UC Berkeley-Audi
Pact Places
Smart-Engine Research on
Bay Area Roads
A new
partnership between the German automaker Audi and California Partners
for Advanced Transit and Highways (PATH), a statewide program housed at
the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Berkeley, will place
high-tech traffic research findings directly into a prototype vehicle
that will navigate through selected highway and arterial routes in the
San Francisco Bay Area.
The project, "AudiStreets," part of Audi's "Clean Air, A
Viable Planet" initiative, seeks to learn how traffic information can
positively impact the environment, traffic safety and traffic
congestion. It will synthesize data and research in the areas of
traffic data collection, emissions- and fuel-consumption-based
navigation and "smart engine" controls to turn an Audi vehicle into a
working prototype of the ultimate traffic- and fuel-smart car. The
project will incorporate data on traffic signals, road conditions,
vehicle velocity, terrain grade and traffic congestion conditions,
creating a composite of information from which smart engine controls
can choose the safest, most fuel-efficient speeds and routes.
PATH researchers
will collect and synthesize data and apply it to smart engine controls; project
partners at UC Riverside will focus on navigation issues. Audi is providing the
research vehicle and the Palo Alto-based Audi Electronics Research Laboratory
is providing computational and interface hardware. The AudiStreets team expects
the 29-month project to yield extensive and demonstrable research results that
can be extrapolated beyond the Bay Area, and, ultimately, applied to bring car
technology further into the future. The proposed research area comprises a 34-mile segment
of I-880 between Oakland and Milpitas, as well as some adjacent highways,
including State Routes 82, 237 and 185, and surface streets. The network was
designed to reflect the diversity of traffic congestion and real driving
options faced by Bay Area drivers so that the solutions developed reflect
actual Bay Area traffic conditions.