Autonomous City Bus

This initiative consists of an autonomous city bus which transports people from a big parking lot to the city centre and shops. The parking lot is just by the Gjøvik Ice Hall. The bus has 3 station based stops and follows a fixed, schedule based route. Along the way, the bus encounters mixed traffic on public streets and pedestrians crossing. The bus is wheelchair accessible. This project is part of the Gjøvik Muncipality climate plan that was adopted by the municipal council on 3 of May 2016.

The purpose of the trial is to learn how a permanent use of such vehicles could, one day, be implemented in Gjøvik. Such buses will be important supplements to the existing public transport service by serving as first and last mile buses to and from other public transport modes. This project has several objectives including: learning how to operate the vehicle, learning how to procure and deliver the service, learning how the general public and users react to the service, learning about the price elasticity for such a service, learning about necessary infrastructure requirements and finally, learning more about the limitations of this potential solution to today’s problems, and participate in improving the necessary technology.

Pilot Permissions have to be applied for.

The challenges of this project included navigating the several slopes of over 9% degree and dealing with some gear system related issues because of the slopes. The vehicles had to go through some technical changes during the pilot in order to deal with these problems.

This pilot is associated with two studies: the national research project, SmartFeeder, led by Sintef and Jernbanedirektoratet as well as the Sohjoa Baltic Project, to which Applied Autonomy transfers knowledge to.