Rouen Normandy Autonomous Lab

Four Renault ZOE all-electric cars, equipped with autonomous systems developed by Transdev and Renault, are being tested on open roads. The vehicles follow a fixed route and are accessible on-demand. The tests cover all scenarios related to typical traffic conditions, such as other vehicles and pedestrians, intersections, roundabouts and building exits. The fleet will also feature an i-Cristal autonomous urban shuttle jointly developed by Transdev and Lohr. The i-Christal shuttle is wheelchair accessible. The vehicles will run on three loops covering 10.5km, with 17 stops across the district and a link to the Rouen public transportation system.
One of the key points of this project is that it is not only about autonomous vehicle, it is also about autonomous mobility integration into the existing public transport system. More than that, this project is also experimenting connected infrastructure and an Operating Control Centre (with a human operator for remote monitoring).

The objective of this project is to be the first on-demand transport service using autonomous electric vehicles on open roads in Europe. The development of expertise in autonomous mobility is a natural evolution for Transdev — combining rapidly emerging technology with their track record of operating safe, multimodal public transportation. Transdev is increasing its expertise as a provider of transportation services (operation, fleet management and customer relations) and also competencies in technologies for autonomous transport systems (supervision, user app, embedded software and smart infrastructure).

It has proven challenging to work both on autonomous vehicles and autonomous mobility integration into the existing public transport system. In addition to this, it has also been challenging to work on connected infrastructure and on the Operating Control Centre.