Momentum - The Magazine for Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering Vol. 2 No. 2 Summer 2017 | Page 9

Virginia Tech’s newest laboratory, the Autonomous
Systems and Intelligent Machines (ASIM) lab, home to a
tiny town with robotic vehicles and now a full-sized Smart
car, provides data-driven, scientific insight into how people
interact with automated vehicle systems -- a crucial new
element to the real-world testing that seeks to improve
transportation systems on a global scale.
For more than twenty years, engineers at Virginia Tech
have been working toward autonomous vehicles. Mechan-
ical engineers have been at the front of the movement,
producing vehicles for the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency and other competitions with the help of
computer scientists, electrical, civil and environmental,
and other engineering disciplines.
The new lab, housed in Goodwin Hall on Virginia Tech’s
Blacksburg campus, is split into two experiential learning
areas to provide a broader picture of an autonomous
environment.
Half the lab is laid out, mimicking a small town complete
with street pattern and road markings amidst a town of
miniature buildings. Robots are used in place of real cars
to emulate driving conditions. The robots are equipped
with vision systems, proximity sensors, and inter-vehicle
communications, so they can sense presence and distance
from each other, talk to each other, and navigate in traffic
without colliding.
Rather than use GPS like full-sized vehicles, the lab is
equipped with an overhead vision system that emulates
GPS. The vision system gives a ground-truth relationship
of the vehicle in relation to the floor map and the environ-
ment allows the researchers to develop safety and control
algorithms that allow the vehicles to follow each other and
gain efficiency – speed – while in a platoon.
'Buildings' with a pur-
pose. The miniature
town where robots
are tested, provide
line-of-sight blocking
and realism to system
testing.
“Anyone can make a slow-moving autonomous vehicle,”
said Azim Eskandarian, ASIM lab director and head of the
Mechanical Engineering Department in the College of
Engineering. “But autonomy for its own sake isn’t enough
– it has to be efficient as well. We are looking at how to de-
termine the correct gaps between vehicles at given speeds,
and how to smoothly merge into a column of autonomous
vehicles. There are control and safety challenges that need
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