Skip to main content

Ford, MIT project measures pedestrian traffic, predict demand for electric shuttles

Ford Motor Company and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are collaborating on a new research project that measures how pedestrians move in urban areas to improve certain public transportation services, such as ride-hailing and point-to-point shuttles services. The project will introduce a fleet of on-demand electric vehicle shuttles that operate on both city roads and campus walkways on the university’s campus. The vehicles use LiDAR sensors and cameras to measure pedestrian flow, which ultimate
July 28, 2016 Read time: 2 mins
278 Ford Motor Company and the 2024 Massachusetts Institute of Technology are collaborating on a new research project that measures how pedestrians move in urban areas to improve certain public transportation services, such as ride-hailing and point-to-point shuttles services.

The project will introduce a fleet of on-demand electric vehicle shuttles that operate on both city roads and campus walkways on the university’s campus. The vehicles use LiDAR sensors and cameras to measure pedestrian flow, which ultimately helps predict demand for the shuttles. This, in turn, helps researchers and drivers route shuttles toward areas with the highest demand to better accommodate passengers.

The researchers plan to introduce the service to a group of students and faculty beginning in September. This group will use a mobile application to hail one of three electric urban vehicles to their location and request to be dropped off at another destination on campus.

During the past five months, Ford and MIT have used LiDAR sensors and cameras mounted to the vehicles to document pedestrian flow between different points on campus. LiDAR is an efficient way to detect and localise objects from the environment surrounding the shuttles. They say the technology is much more accurate than GPS, emitting short pulses of laser light to precisely pinpoint the vehicles’ location on a map and detect the movement of nearby pedestrians and objects.

Using this data, researchers study the overall pattern of how pedestrian traffic moves across campus, which helps the researchers anticipate where the most demand for the shuttles will be at any given moment. This allows the shuttles to be carefully pre-positioned and routed to serve the MIT population as efficiently as possible.

Researchers also take into account other factors that affect pedestrian movement on MIT’s campus, such as varying weather conditions, class schedules, and the dynamic habits of students and professors across different semesters.

“The onboard sensors and cameras gather pedestrian data to estimate the flow of foot traffic,” said Ken Washington, vice president of Research and Advanced Engineering at Ford. “This helps us develop efficient algorithms that bring together relevant data. It improves mobility-on-demand services, and aids ongoing pedestrian detection and mapping efforts for autonomous vehicle research.”

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • ComfortDelGro to test autonomous shuttle in Singapore traffic
    November 13, 2018
    ComfortDelGro will trial an autonomous shuttle bus in real traffic conditions at the National University of Singapore’s (NUS) Kent Ridge Campus from March 2019.
  • The benefits of Lidar
    March 21, 2022

    While Lidar is gaining ground in the ITS industry, it has not yet reached the level of mass adoption where it shows up frequently in requests for proposals (RFPs) from cities and DoTs.

  • City of Las Vegas deploys smart city technology to enhance pedestrian safety
    June 30, 2017
    The city of Las Vegas is partnering with data specialist Numina and technology company Motionloft in a pilot scheme to enhance pedestrian safety in its recently-established Innovation District, which aims to be the home of new transportation infrastructure and mobility technologies.
  • New Zealand airport to trial autonomous shuttle
    January 27, 2017
    New Zealand’s first on-road research trial of autonomous vehicles has been launched at Christchurch Airport, with the arrival of a fully autonomous Smart Shuttle which will begin testing in the next few weeks. Christchurch International Airport has partnered with the country’s intelligent transport system (ITS) supplier, HMI Technologies for the trial, which will use a French manufactured NAVYA ARMA autonomous shuttle vehicle operating on private roads of the Christchurch International Airport campus. Th