ABSTRACT 

The transportation industry is undergoing major revolutionary changes that promise increased capacity, reliability, affordability, and sustainability. Major achievements have been made in automated vehicles and computing technologies. With current technological advancements, the community is getting ready to deploy autonomous vehicles as an emerging transportation technology. These changes will disrupt traditional transportation technologies while creating new opportunities benefiting society. Most of these technological efforts, however, are focusing on urban environments. In order to be better prepared for these transformative changes, it is essential to assess the deployment of autonomous vehicles to accommodate rural terrain and infrastructure, and conditions. Roads in rural areas are for long-distance travel, have rugged terrain, and alternate surface types. They may also lack pavement markings, often due to an existing backlog of maintenance, lack of funding resources, and personnel for new deployments. These create challenges for AV deployment in rural areas. This talk reviews recent efforts at NCA&T in the development of autonomous driving shuttles, considering crucial aspects, such as state estimation and localization, object detection, motion planning, and human-machine interface. The developed vehicles are endowed with a modular and robust perception architecture comprising a variety of sensors and embedded intelligence. Complex maneuvering in rural scenarios under narrow and hilly roads is assessed. We will specifically focus on addressing challenges such as low GPS coverage and low visible lane marking driving scenarios and will present the results from tests performed in a confined driving environment at NCA&T AV rural test track.