Inside Smart Mobility Living Lab: the London space creating our autonomous vehicle future

The Lab is one of the most advanced testbeds for autonomous vehicles in the world 
One of the Lab's autonomous vehicles — the cars drive along a 24km stretch of the road to test out different scenarios
Smart Mobility Living Lab
Amelia Heathman30 September 2020

The UK’s most advanced driverless cars testbed has officially opened its doors today and is encouraging businesses and manufacturers working on the future of mobility to come down and learn from its research.

Based in Woolwich, the Smart Mobility Living Lab (SMLL) launched in 2018 as part of a collaboration between different partners in the mobility space, including the Transport Research Laboratory (TRL), Transport for London, Cisco, Zenzic and DG Cities, to explore the future of transport. The aim of the lab is to help businesses and public sector organisations make future mobility a safe and commercial reality, with a focus on autonomous vehicles and how they can change the world.

“What we’re doing here is helping to bring new things forward, and explore all these different things that can work together to give better lives,” TRL’s CEO Paul Campion tells the Standard.

The SMLL serves many different purposes. On one side there is the actual testing and training of autonomous vehicles. There are 196 sites featuring connected cameras set up across 24km of road between the centre and the Olympic Park. These cameras are analysing what happens on the roads in order to provide real-world scenarios to companies creating software for autonomous vehicles.

This area encompasses new, purpose-built wide roads around the Olympic stadium to the smaller, older commuter roads in Greenwich which can offer up a variety of scenarios to cars, such as pedestrians crossing the road, roundabouts, and zebra crossings. This is one of the few places in the UK where tests can take place on real roads.

“The cameras monitor where vehicles are going and then the video analysis side can be done in post-processing or in real-time,” explains TRL project manager Tom Tompkin. "This helps autonomous vehicle developers and manufacturers to have static, repeatable test areas that they can try.”

The different scenarios created from these real-world interactions have been used to create a fully virtual version of the routes. As Campion explains, companies test their computer design models that will be the brain of the autonomous car on the digital twin, before it’s allowed to be tried on the roads. “You can do months or years of testing in days. People sitting in Tokyo are busy allowing their autonomous car to drive around London’s streets virtually.”

The SMLL in Woolwich is getting ready to open its doors to companies and partners to come use its tech
Smart Mobility Living Lab

The Lab has two Nissan cars set up to drive autonomously, which companies can use to plug in their own software to try it out officially. But there are other ways that the SMLL can be used, aside from simply carrying out autonomous drives.

For instance, companies in other areas of industry, such as insurance, energy, and supply chain logistics, can hire the lab as part of its shared innovation programme. “We now that fixed transport is going to be radically different. These companies are collaborating together to really explore some ideas about how the future might be,” says Campion.

There are other questions the lab is exploring in its work with partners and collaborators on how these vehicles will work and fit into our future. Who will clean the robot taxis we use? Will we own or share these autonomous vehicles? How much energy will they use, and what impact does that have on the decarbonised future? Are autonomous vehicles even the solution for the future of transport?

“It’s an absolutely fascinating moment of history,” says Campion. “In our lifetimes, we will see transport change more than it has done in 100 years. The world we see around us - how old are tube trains or taxis? Over 100 years old. But it is going to change in the next 10 or 20 years and technology is going to create a whole new set of opportunities.”

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