TalTech is establishing co-operation with the US on developing self-driving cars

Tallinn University of Technology is signing a co-operation agreement with Florida Polytechnic University on the 10th of April, to join forces for future development and increasing security of automated vehicles (AV).

Self-driving cars and other autonomous systems are one of the most paradigm-changing technological developments in today's world. Transportation is affecting every single person and has a large impact on economic development. There will be huge challenges to solve and international cooperation is crucial here.

Tallinn University of Technology (TalTech), Self-driving vehicles and autonomous systems research group in Estonia has demonstrated its high-level competence and capability to design and develop an AV shuttle from scratch. As been focused mainly on vehicle development and implementation the next challenge is to integrate AVs to real traffic situations but in a safe and robust way. 

Florida Polytechnic University (FloridaPoly) Advanced Mobility Institute (AMI) in the US is a leading institute focused on the test and verification of autonomous vehicles. FloridaPoly AMI has developed unique verification and scenario simulation tools to analyze and find edge situations in respect of safety and accident analysis. They are working towards a Transportation Operating System concept which will change the whole paradigm how transportation is handled and coordinated on cloud-based solutions.

Both universities have strong research groups working on self-driving cars at a higher level, TalTech research group is led by the Dr. Raivo Sell, FloridaPoly research group is led by Dr. Rahul Razdan.

The research collaboration will use FloridaPoly’s unique capability in testing to improve the robustness of TalTech automated vehicle system. In the process, FloridaPoly’s tools and methodologies will be tested in realistic environments provided by TalTech.

The cooperation has been made possible by Baltic-American Freedom Foundation grant financing TalTech researchers visit and network building to the US.

Raivo Sell, the manager of the self-driving car project and scientist at TalTech says that the co-operation with FloridaPoly is accelerating the technological developments in the field of autonomous vehicles in Europe: “Safety is the key issue in the deployment of self-driving cars. The validation methodology and simulations of scenarios, give us significant added value and enable the development of safer technical solutions for self-driving cars.”

FloridaPoly scientist Rahul Razdan considers this co-operation very synergistic: “We aim at showing the robustness of this technology.”

The co-operation agreement will be signed at the Estonian Embassy in Washington DC during the technology roundtable event “Autonomous vehicles Science and Technology in Smart City Use Cases”, led by the ambassador. Both the US and Estonian specialists will participate as speakers at this roundtable.