UW rolls out first autonomous bus in Canada

The wheels on the bus went round and round at the University of Waterloo Thursday morning, but the person at the wheel did none of the work.

UW introduced its first autonomous bus to media members.

The bright green bus was seen doing laps around Ring Road, operated by someone in a control room on-campus and a person behind the physical wheel acting as a safeguard just in case.

“Automated driving is a complex task, trying to somehow replace humans with a machine on such a difficult thing,” said Amir Khajepour, professor in department of mechanical and mechatronics engineering at UW.

He said we've seen huge progress in the last couple of years, and the hope is to have a service running on campus with this, and four other autonomous vehicles by the time students return in the fall.

“Hopefully, we can get all the certifications and guidelines to run this on campus,” he said. “The idea is to run it on our south campus, then try to add the north campus. 

He said this kind of technology is very new, but there's a lot of interest.

“There are many cities here in Canada that are trying to somehow evaluate whether (autonomous vehicles) can fit into their fleet of public transportation or not,” he said. “So the plan is to use (the campus as) a test bed.”

A group of 20 PhD students contributed to this project, who Khajepour said will move on to become the next entrepreneurs of this industry in Canada.

The work was done in partnership with Rogers, who are in the midst of a three-year partnership with the school.

The 5G technology played a big part in putting this project together.

“With the 5G network, you need a lot of throughput and download speeds, and you need a lot of low latency in order to be able to communicate remotely,” said Neel Dayal, the senior director of innovation and partnerships with Rogers Communications.

“And so, without that 5G network, you really wouldn't have that responsiveness that's required to be able to operate the vehicle in real time.”

“In addition, as we evolve this program, there's going to be more communication happening between things like the traffic lights and the bus, augmenting the safety of the vehicle even further.”

He said it's a fantastic feeling to get to this point, in creating the first 5G-operated autonomous shuttle in the country.

“(Rogers has) invested in both the infrastructure and funding different research projects,” Dayal added, “As we deployed our 5G low latency network, we've been exploring different use cases to support some of the work that's happening here.”

“As you experienced through your tour of the bus, whenever there's an opportunity to remotely take over the bus because of an unexpected event, you can do that over a low latency 5G network, which Rogers has provided.”

Dayal admitted there is a hesitancy for people when they think of driverless vehicles, but that ability to take a vehicle over remotely can provide a level of comfort.

As for what this signifies for the future, Khajepour said this project allows them to collect data and see how it adapts in Canadian weather.

There are other applications as well, getting automated vehicles operating in familiar environments they can be programmed to, whether it be a resort, a campus or even in workplaces like open pit mines or factories.