Center for Environmental Research and Technology

CE-CERT students Zhouqiao Zhao, Zhensong Wei, Yu Jiang (graduated), Xuanpeng Zhao, Shangrui Liu, and Pingbo Ruan, and faculty advisors Dr. Guoyuan Wu and Dr. Kanok Boriboonsomsin took 2nd place in this year’s International AUTOnomous vehicle TRAffic Challenge (called AUTOTRAC), held on June 17, 2021. AUTOTRAC is an internationally recognized competition funded by the European Commission under the Joint Research Centre’s (JRC) Exploratory Research Program, aiming to raise awareness about the potential impact of automated vehicles’ cooperation in future transport networks. To accommodate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the final event of the competition was postponed and held in the form of an online event as part of the 7th International IEEE Conference on Models and Technologies for Intelligent Transportation Systems.

In this year’s challenge, seven universities teams from around the world competed against each other with self-built fleets of small-scale connected and automated vehicles (CAVs), to promote the conceptualization and implementation of collaborative behaviors among different agents via automated driving and communications. In the final round of competition, three final teams – University of California Riverside, Technical University of Delft, and Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences – demonstrated the performance of their in-house fleet of four small-scale CAVs in a highway scenario and urban scenario, respectively, in terms of better network utilization. UCR came in second place, with TU Delft taking first.
This information was provided by the EU Science Hub

UC Riverside’s Project 

The CE-CERT AUTROTRAC team began developing this project in the Spring of 2020. The inspiration for this project came from the goal to build a scaled smart city platform which may leverage cooperative automated driving to improve the transportation network efficiency. This project ties in particularly well with the dissertation topic of Zhouqiao Zhao (a key team member), which studies an innovative framework for connected automation-enabled cooperative traffic management. 

Building up the scaled smart city platform is a key step to enable more cost-effective and higher fidelity modeling and evaluation of CAV technologies via everything in the loop simulation (XiL). As Dr. Guoyuan Wu, a CE-CERT researcher and AUTOTRAC team advisor, mentioned, “The completion of this challenge lays down an excellent foundation for our future work on cooperative automated driving or smart city related research.” This platform development will be an excellent resource to support other CE-CERT transportation-related research and future projects, such as the Toyota Digital Twin Project. 

The AUTOTRAC project team was also awarded the People’s Choice Award in the Student Poster Competition at the IEEE SusTech 2021 conference.