AutOCampus project, our experimentation shuttle has arrived at UT3

The EasyMile autonomous shuttle made its debut on the campus of Paul Sabatier University on October 1st. IRIT researchers are working on research projects within the framework of the VILAGIL project, a program for the transformation of the territory led by Toulouse Métropole and financed by the Caisse des dépôts and Toulouse Métropole. The research work is being carried out by the following laboratories: CLLE, IRIT, LAAS, LERASS, LISST and research teams from ENAC and ONERA. The autonomous vehicle is used as an experimental support in the fields of mobility and smart city.

An autonomous shuttle at UT3

The EasyMile autonomous shuttle will be inaugurated in early 2022, on the Toulouse Rangueil campus. It will be used for innovation and research in computer science on issues related to vehicle autonomy and connectivity. A study will be conducted on the acceptability of users and their experience as users. The processing of the data that will be returned by the shuttle is the subject of work to make this data “easy to find, accessible, interoperable and reusable”. Research is being conducted to facilitate the insertion of the shuttle into the campus network infrastructure through the development of new vehicular communication capabilities (V2X). Campus users will be part of this experiment and will be immersed in this new generation campus, to define the mobility of tomorrow.

Issues related to mobility

The campus of the University Toulouse III Paul Sabatier is an experimental area for autonomous and connected intelligent transport systems in a dense urban environment. The VILAGIL project seeks to work on issues related to mobility and IRIT researchers integrate four research programs related to this issue. These four programs focus on: urban planning in relation to human-machine interaction, virtual reality and traffic simulation; data and mobility, i.e. the development of tools for storing and interpreting data, the development of a virtual mobility assistant (MaaS) whose purpose is to contribute to the development of new mobility services applicable to carpooling, among others and experiments with the autonomous shuttle.

The AutOCampus experimental program

The AutOCampus program is an experimentation program whose first step is to put the autonomous shuttle into service. There is no commercial commitment as the goal of the program is purely experimental. The objectives of the autOCampus platform are to build a unique and original place to experiment connected and autonomous vehicles. autOCampus is a place of scientific animation and collaboration between research, industry, training and users around the connected and autonomous vehicle through several projects. The idea is to create a platform for experimenting with projects while sharing resources such as hardware, software and data and making common goods available.