Innovative Mobility

Vanderbilt and its partners are innovating across the spectrum of mobility from roads and vehicles to transportation systems and city services. Learn more about how our collaborative teams are delivering highly advanced, learning-enabled autonomous vehicle control systems that can revolutionize inter-city mobility, artificial intelligence that can efficiently connect communities via multi-modal transit operations, and award-winning, practitioner-centric intelligent solutions for next-level emergency response management.

Real-World Mobility Testbeds: Safer, Smarter, Healthier Roads

Traffic congestion is a major challenge for modern cities, but what if new technologies could help reduce traffic congestion, fuel consumption, and crashes? Vanderbilt’s Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering Dan Work and the Tennessee Department of Transportation (TDOT) aim to do just that with the I-24 Motion, a world-class mobility testbed that uses hundreds of ultra-high-definition sensors to create digital models of traffic in unparalleled detail (Fig. 1).

Together, Vanderbilt, TDOT, and industry collaborators are well on their way to creating the smartest roadway in the world with advancements like I-24 MOTION, a first-of-its-kind 4-mile testbed for autonomous vehicles and an artificial intelligence (AI)-based decision support system (DSS) that can improve traffic flow and incidence response with coordinated arterial traffic signals and dynamic speed limits that respond to real-world conditions and driver behavior.

But our collaborations with TDOT don’t end there. Vanderbilt has already demonstrated how to advance sustainable transportation by using its own campus as a testbed: With MoveVU, we showed how commuters can be incentivized to take public transportation to campus, and expanded their options for safe and healthy travel with better bike lanes throughout campus, and more. Now, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering Mark Abkowitz and his team are building on MoveVU with $8.4M in equally shared support from TDOT and Vanderbilt University to scale up sustainability and reduce emissions even further with improved shuttle service transit, bike share services, traffic optimization technologies, and new curbside and micro-mobility best practices.

Our researchers already discovered that even a small percentage of driverless vehicles can increase traffic fuel efficiency up to 40%, which we know is important to maximize efficiency and address electric vehicle range anxiety. Learn more about TDOT’s pioneering I-24 Smart Corridor and Vanderbilt faculty Dan Work, Jonathan Sprinkle, and Mark Abkowitz.

Autonomous Control Systems: Safer, Smarter Land, Air and Water Vehicles

Autonomous vehicles can dramatically improve safety, but they come with their own safety challenges. At Vanderbilt, Professor of Computer Science Gabor Karsai and Vanderbilt collaborators Xenofon Koutsoukos, Taylor Johnson, Abhishek Dubey, and Ted Bapty are tackling these challenges head-on by developing a new autonomous vehicle control system that is capable of continually learning, assessing, and assuring safety in highly uncertain environments with support from DARPA’s Assured Autonomy program. This state-of-the-art architecture implements real-time contingency-management functions and adjustable decision-making logic to ensure safe operations of driverless cars, drones, and even watercraft.

With a team of collaborators at NASA and other partner institutions, Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Engineering Gautam Biswas is taking this kind of thinking to the skies with the development of a new electrical, autonomous ‘air taxi’ for advanced inter-city mobility (Fig. 3). To ensure these aircraft operate safely, Biswas and his team at Vanderbilt are building learning algorithms that enable pilotless risk evaluation and real-time decision-making in highly challenging situations. In the future, these services could also enhance connectivity to rural and remote areas.

Continuing the theme of systems that learn, Vanderbilt Assistant Professor of Computer Science Soheil Kolouri is leading an international DARPA-funded initiative to develop artificial intelligence programs that continually share their lifetime experiences with each other, an approach that enables machines to reuse information and adapt to new conditions much as human beings learn from interacting with each other. Real-world applications include self-driving cars and systems for robotic exploration, emergency monitoring, and cyber security.

Learn more about Vanderbilt faculty Gabor Karsai, Gautam Biswas, and Soheil Kolouri.

Efficient Public Transit, Smart City Services, and Emergency Response Management Solutions

Efficiently operating public transportation is a critical challenge for communities across the country, but what if we can create an integrated multi-modal public transportation service that combines fixed-transit, dynamic microtransit and micro-mobility options such as bikes? Vanderbilt faculty member Abhishek Dubey, the Chattanooga Area Regional Transportation Authority (CARTA), and Nashville WeGo are collaborating to do just that by developing more efficient transit operation algorithms for smart and connected communities (Fig. 4). The team focuses on predicting the expected demand (CARTA, WeGo), operationalizing on-demand microtransit (CARTA), optimizing the schedule and vehicle assignment for energy consumption based on the predicted information (CARTA), and providing support for scheduling additional vehicles to reduce high occupancy levels on fixed line buses (WeGo). The approach includes state-of-the-art machine learning solutions, high-resolution telemetry, and sequential decision support algorithms using reinforcement learning and Monte-Carlo tree search. More information is available at smarttransit.ai.

These days, almost everything from traffic lights to parking meters collects data, but as long as the data from these systems remain disconnected, the most innovative solutions to pressing safety and transportation challenges remain beyond reach. To surmount this challenge, multiple teams at Vanderbilt are developing more intelligent, interoperable cyber-physical systems (CPS), including sensors and data from traffic lights, parking garages, wearable technology, and smartphones. Faculty members Abhishek Dubey and Douglas Schmidt are leading the Siemens-funded development of an application architecture called CHARIOT for a universal cyber-physical component model that allows distributed CPS applications to be constructed using different software and hardware components without being tied down to any specific platform or middleware.

Even more pressing for resilient communities is the need to respond efficiently and effectively to emergency situations and proactively assign first responders where they are most needed. To do that, Abhishek Dubey and his team are developing an open-source, practitioner-centric toolchain to help first responders understand where and when incidents occur, and how to allocate responders in anticipation of incidents (Fig. 5). This innovation could shift the paradigm in Emergency Response Management from reactive to proactive, saving time, equipment, and most importantly, people’s lives. It has already been showcased at multiple global smart city summits, won innovation awards from the Government Technology Magazine and at the International Conference on Learning Representations’ AI for Social Good workshop, and was featured in the Financial Times.

Learn more about Vanderbilt faculty Abhishek Dubey and Douglas Schmidt.