ZEBRA arrives on campus
Surrey has become one of the very few UK universities to have an autonomous vehicle test bed on campus, with the recent addition of the StreetDrone Twizy.
The vehicle, known as ZEBRA (Zero Emission test Bed for Research on Autonomous driving), was welcomed onto campus on 23 May by academics from the Centre for Automotive Engineering within the Department of Mechanical Engineering Sciences.
The new test bed will enable Surrey to implement and test autonomous driving technologies and software rapidly and on-site, opening the door to exciting new research developments. ZEBRA is a customised version of Renault’s Twizy and features drive-by-wire technology, a LiDAR scanner and eight cameras.
Professor in Advanced Vehicle Engineering, Aldo Sorniotti, said: “We are already developing various elements of autonomous driving technology, and this new test bed will give us the platform for more effective research in this area. By having this resource on campus, we can put our theories to the test immediately and make improvements much more quickly.”
Among other research, the Centre for Automotive Engineering has recently analysed the benefits of ‘torque-vectoring’ (the ability to vary the torque for each wheel) for autonomous electric vehicles.
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