AUTOMATED AND ELECTRIC VEHICLES
VIRTUAL REALITY AND AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES: A MATCH MADE IN TECH HEAVEN Monash University has developed VRAV – an augmented on-road driving simulator for autonomous vehicles using virtual reality, offering a potential means to test drivers’ responses to unsafe driving conditions. The project has impressed the industry, winning the 2019 Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) National Research Award. Here, Infrastructure spoke with Professor Hai L. Vu about the potential applications of the technology and how it fits into the wider scope of driverless vehicle uptake in Australia.
M
onash has developed the first on-road autonomous vehicle (AV) simulator in Australia based on the concept known as “Wizard-ofOz” where the driver of a standard vehicle is hidden from the passenger (participant) using a physical partition, providing the participant the illusion of riding in an AV. However, in contrast to the traditional Wizardof-Oz settings, the participant is wearing a VR headset in this simulation, and thus riding an AV without a driver and within a virtual environment which is in sync with the actual physical environment. For this reason, the simulation was named VRAV. The research is supported by the Monash Infrastructure (MI) seed funding grant and led by Professor Hai L. Vu from the Monash Institute of Transport Studies, in collaboration with the faculties of Engineering, Information Technology, Monash University Accident Research Centre (MUARC) and Monash Art Design & Architecture (MADA). The project is multi-disciplinary as it utilises expertise in autonomous vehicle (Civil Eng., Professor Hai L. Vu), AR/VR and HMI (IT and software engineering, Dr Barrett Ens), invehicle design (MADA, Associate Professor Selby Coxon), and driving simulation and road safety (MUARC, Dr Steve O’Hern). All the academic members are leading researchers in their own field with many years of research experience relevant to this project. The outcome is a virtual on-road driving simulator
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June 2020 // Issue 15
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