Evolution of Bus Shuttle Service in Madrid Towards Autonomous Operation, A Practical Use Case

Abstract

Autonomous Vehicles are one of the current technological developments called to be one of the fundamental pillars on which a new safe and intelligent urban mobility is built. The usability of this technology in large public transport systems will mean a change in the paradigm of urban mobility, allowing highly efficient transport networks. Therefore, this work presents the retrofitting of a conventional bus into a fully autonomous vehicle capable of transporting people between different locations within the facilities of the Empresa Municipal de Transporte de Madrid. The work shows all the development carried out to transform such a platform together with a set of results extracted from the commissioning tests of the different systems involved in the hardware and software architecture that allow the operation of such a service.