Live-Learning Lab rendering provided by CARTA A $25 million federal grant awarded to Chattanooga Area Regional Transportation Authority (CARTA) will help bring a new generation of transportation technology to downtown Chattanooga. The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga will play a central role in research, education and workforce development. CARTA announced at a press conference that it received the funding through the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Better Utilizing Investments to Leverage Development (BUILD) grant program. The award will support the replacement of its downtown electric shuttles with autonomous vehicles, along with the infrastructure needed to operate them. The project will also create an autonomous vehicle command center and the Live-Learning Lab at CARTA’s Shuttle Park South, where UTC students and faculty will be able to study the technology as it operates on Chattanooga streets. The project will add to years of research by UTC’s Center for Urban Informatics and Progress (CUIP). “This project gives us an opportunity to really build on that foundation and have our faculty and students conduct research, develop new intellectual property, move that IP toward commercialization,” Chancellor Lori Bruce said at the press conference. Bruce shared that the lab will allow students and faculty to “conduct their research, do R&D, take courses, and have real-time hands-on activities.” Dr. Mina Sartipi, UTC interim vice chancellor for research and founding director of CUIP, said the project will help researchers take their work into an operating autonomous transit system. “Rather than studying individual technologies in isolation, we will be able to work alongside an operational autonomous transit system and explore how vehicles, roadway infrastructure, traffic signals, communications systems and transportation operations can work together as one connected ecosystem,” Sartipi said. A major part of that work will focus on connectivity. Autonomous vehicles use cameras and sensors to understand their surroundings,