By the fall, if all goes according to plan, a boxy van, une navette autonome, will make its way without a driver along a main strip of the Montreal suburb Terrebonne. This kind of project may be among the first steps of the revolution-to-come of self-driving vehicles.
Gently rolling along a preset course, at no more than 25 kilometres an hour, the pilot project is based on one in Lyon, France, and is in the process of getting provincial regulatory approval.
But the shuttle would seem far more sedate than the fleets of driverless cars people have imaged tooling around residential blocks or self-driving truck convoys thundering down the highway. This may be the more practical, immediate future of autonomous vehicles in Canada, according to experts.
And in the near term, it is a future in which driverless systems won't actually drive the cars. Instead, the driverless technology will be used to monitor drivers for potential errors.
More than just stepping-stones, these applications will show how an autonomous-mobility future might realistically come to be, said Steven Waslander, associate professor at the University of Waterloo and director of the Waterloo Autonomous Vehicles Laboratory.