URBAN-CAD

The City of Tempere has dedicated a test field to developing future connected and automated driving functions for certain situations as well as automated urban first/last-mile busses. Examples of such scenarios is VALET parking, intersection, passenger services and winter conditions. The infrastructures include ten Pre-5G base-stations, real urban roads, positioning services, maps and V2X equipped intersections. The routes are located in sub-urban Hervanta which is the Tampere region technology village. In 2022, a tramline between the city centre of Tampere and sub-urban Hervanta will be operational. The automated vehicles will serve to cover the first/last-mile distance for the passengers of the tram. There will be about five bus stops available along the route of the autonomous buses. The area is in operation and will regularly be updated according to facility owners and user needs. The area was created for multiple parallel projects looking for different aspects of automated driving needs.

The first aim of URBAN-CAD is to offer developers a place to adapt and validate their technology before entering it on the market. The second aim is to enable the creation of new AV functions which would boost the economic growth of the concerned companies. Finally, URBAN-CAD also aims to learn about future mobility needs of people. This research has started in restricted areas before deploying it on a wider scale.

So far, €1m has been collected through investments. Investments are about €200,000 per year. The main investor is the City of Tampere which has created the communication infrastructure within the area. VTT also has a significant role in facilitating automated driving platforms and some parts of the services.

The City of Tampere provides permits for road infrastructures. Automated driving licenses are administered by Traficom, the traffic safety authority in Finland.

One challenge encountered is automated driving during winter as the lane markings and curbs are not easily visible.

By 2021, the facility is expected to serve about 40-80 passengers per day with 2-4 automated last-mile busses connected to the tram line service. The total length of the different routes in the test field are about 30 km. AVs will not go over the maximum urban area speed which is 40 km/h. Currently, the speed of the pre-products is limited at 20 km/h. The facility is working on developing connected and automated driving functions to deal with particular challenges such as during the winter. Reliability is high over the summer but robustness needs to be improved during the winter.