Jaguar Land Rover is partnering with global software, mobility and telecoms companies to create a smart city hub that will allow real-world testing of connected technology where self-driving vehicles share the streets with cars, pedestrians and cyclists.
The Future Mobility Campus Ireland (FMCI) will be a collaborative testbed spread across 12km of public roads, providing the facilities and expertise to harness valuable sensor data, simulate a variety of road environments and traffic scenarios and trial new technologies. As part of the trials, the all-electric Jaguar I-PACE will be deployed for testing.
The testbed will advance Jaguar Land Rover’s research into autonomous, connected, electrified and shared vehicles – a key part of the company’s commitment to making societies safer and healthier with pioneering technology.
The real-world facility will be equipped with sensors throughout the site, along with high-accuracy location systems, a data management and control centre and self-driving prototype vehicles. It will feature smart junctions, connected roads, autonomous parking and electric vehicle charging as well as links to a 450km stretch of connected highway and a managed air traffic corridor for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) from Shannon airport along the Shannon Estuary in Ireland.
Jaguar Land Rover is a lead partner of the FMCI and will collaborate with a host of other global technology companies to develop the facility, including Cisco, Seagate, Renovo, Red Hat and Mergon. The FMCI provides Jaguar Land Rover with a key research site next to an existing facility: its Shannon software hub.
Commenting on the development, John Cormican, General Manager for Shannon Ireland Jaguar Land Rover, expressed the belief that hi company’s collaborating with top-tier software companies will translate to development of future systems more efficiently.
He said: “This partnership with FMCI provides us with a real-world facility to trial our emerging autonomous, connected, electrified and shared technology in a strategic location. Collaborating with top-tier software companies will allow us to develop our future systems more efficiently.”
FMCI was founded with the sole purpose of creating and delivering future mobility testbed facilities for stimulating research, development and innovation in the area of Autonomous Connected Electric Shared Vehicles (ACES), including Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAV) in Ireland. The testbed will be located in the Limerick-Shannon metropolitan area at Shannon Free Zone, Shannon, Co.Clare.
FMCI aims to deliver an ACES test facility located in real-world settings, providing technology companies and researchers the ability to test and enhance their innovations. The test facility consists of a road network that is retrofitted with interconnected state of the art sensing and telecommunication technologies. That are fully accessible and controlled via a dedicated control centre. The target users/customers of this facility include national and international automotive and technology providers that are interested in testing their innovations in real-world settings before the product release phase.
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