We are delighted to share an exciting update regarding a recent MSU Mobility project. You might already have seen our new electric autonomous bus traveling along Farm Lane. The 22‑seat vehicle will soon enter campus service thanks to a $100,000 Michigan Office for Future Mobility and Electrification grant to our partner ADASTEC.
The bus will be one of the largest electric autonomous vehicles deployed on U.S. roadways to date and available for students, staff and faculty to ride in early 2022. Before that, however, with the support of MSU Police and Public Safety, we are conducting intense on‑campus testing to achieve National Highway Traffic Safety Administration validation for the vehicle, route and infrastructure, which we expect to be completed in December.
The safety of our campus community, motorists and pedestrians is a top priority. Already, we have completed 270 tests of the route with the bus and before the bus will accept passengers, it will have finished approximately 630 test trips on campus. The bus travels at 15 mph during testing, with the speed planned to increase to 25 mph once fully operational in 2022. To further ensure safety, a trained operator will be present at all times to take control if needed.
The bus’s 2.5‑mile nonstop, round-trip route will run from the MSU Auditorium to the MSU Commuter Lot (#89), at the corner of Mt. Hope and Farm Lane.
This latest addition to our autonomous vehicle fleet furthers MSU Mobility’s efforts to test, validate and research all areas of mobility via our connected ecosystem. We will collect and analyze data from the bus including how pedestrians, riders and other drivers interact with it; vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication technologies; and experiential input from persons with disabilities to inform future design considerations.
We are incredibly excited to have this electric autonomous bus on campus. We encourage you to take a ride next semester once the bus has fulfilled all testing requirements.
To learn more about the bus and MSU’s mobility efforts, visit mobility.msu.edu. And be sure to check back on this page following our announcement Friday for more information on the autonomous bus.
Sincerely, Satish Udpa, Interim Director of MSU Mobility, University Distinguished Professor of electrical and computer engineering
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