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An expert panel that features a Waterloo Engineering professor released its report today on the potential impact and key issues surrounding connected, autonomous, shared and electric (CASE) vehicles.

Convened in the summer of 2019 by the Council of Canadian Academies (CCA), the panel stressed there are pressing decisions required to achieve potential benefits from CASE vehicles including economic growth and cleaner, safer, more accessible transportation.

Researchers have created a new testing and training tool to inspire solutions to the particularly complex challenges of developing autonomous vehicles (AVs) capable of handling winter weather. 

Released today, the free, open-source dataset - dubbed the Canadian Adverse Driving Conditions Dataset (CADC) - is a collaboration of research teams at Waterloo Engineering and the University of Toronto that are working to advance AV perception algorithms. Read the full story.

Thursday, February 7, 2019

Midnight Sun builds on winning past

Real-world experience working on a Waterloo vehicle team helped an undergraduate student land a plum co-op job at Tesla.

Members of the company’s hiring committee were so impressed with Devon Copeland’s work with Waterloo’s Midnight Sun Solar Car that they asked him to make a presentation about his involvement with the team.

If you’re driving along and you pass a car beside you with no-one inside driving, you just might be in Ontario.

The provincial government has changed the rules to allow testing of fully autonomous vehicles, without someone behind the wheel.  Testing of vehicles with no-one in the driver’s seat has been done on closed tracks, while some testing has been allowed on public roads but with someone in the driver’s seat just in case.

The common misconception when it comes to automation is that it just happens. Like the Terminator stepping from a crackling energy bubble transported from the future, it just arrives fully intact, ready to go.

Roboticists are quick to point out that reality occurs much more slowly. Automation, instead, happens one small step at a time over the course of many years.

Such is the case with cars, which are on their way to becoming self-driving. But, as per the truism of robotic reality, it’s happening more gradually than some proponents may suggest. Also, the process has been under way for decades.

‘To our knowledge, nobody in the world is doing this,’ says researcher

WATERLOO, ONT. — A research project aimed at developing three-dimensional, high-definition mapping (3D HD) could give Ontario an edge in the race to develop autonomous vehicles.

The new technology would give self-driving cars functional capabilities to handle any type of weather, and would be marketed commercially without any proprietary rights.

Researchers at the University of Waterloo reached an important milestone this summer by logging their 100th kilometre on public roads in a self-driving car.

Recorded in an industrial area of Waterloo, it was the culmination of almost two years of work since the research team won approval from the Ontario government to do on-road testing in an autonomous vehicle pilot program.