Plans have been announced to construct a new transport technology R&D centre on the MIRA site in Warwickshire.
Each of the test circuits of the innovITS-ADVANCE centre will be instrumented with telecommunications networks including: 2G, 3G, GPRS, WiFi, roadside beacons and monitoring systems such as inductive loops, and accurate position monitoring technologies including differential GPS, and in the future, Galileo systems.
The first phase will involve the construction of a ‘city’ circuit including roads, traffic islands, roundabouts and controlled intersections, within the existing envelope of the MIRA site. The circuit is due to open in the late summer of 2009.
The centre is the result of a collaboration between innovITS, set up by the the UK government’s Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform in 2005 to advance Intelligent Transport Systems, MIRA and TRL. The project is to involve the investment of some 30 million euros over five phases, of which the city circuit is only phase one. Possible projects that might be carried out could include: collision avoidance and mitigation, driver behaviour studies, intersection safety, vulnerable road user detection, telematics robustness in poor reception areas, road sign detection, traffic management, advance driver assistance systems, time and distance based road charging and autonomous vehicles.
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