Test center gives glimpse into world of autonomous vehicles

YPSILANTI, MI A 500-acre test facility for autonomous vehicles recently held an open house to show how companies are using lane detection, mobile apps to inspect poor roads and new methods of detecting pedestrians in the quest to make driving safer.

Those were a few of the innovative concepts demonstrated in June at the American Center for Mobility in Ypsilanti…

RoadBotics, a smartphone-enabled road-inspection application, was developed at Carnegie Mellon by the same research group who developed Uber autonomous vehicles, co-founder Mark DeSantis said.

The app identifies and diagnoses road defects for pavement engineers in an attempt to prevent the conditions from worsening.

“What I want to do is see the small … subtle changes to make a small, cheap, inexpensive fix. Waiting till it gets bad costs a ton of money,” DeSantis said.
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