$15 million grant toward autonomous vehicles research

A $15 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation will fund the Center for Connected and Automated Transportation, a collaborative facility at the University of Michigan that researches autonomous vehicles. CCAT director Henry Liu, professor of civil and environmental engineering, told The Michigan Daily that the $15 million grant will fund research on transportation safety technologies. “We are conducting research on not only the technology of connected automated vehicles, but also (how) the technology impacts society when these vehicles (are) introduced into the field,” Liu said. “The major difference with this (new grant) versus last grant is we (are) adding three more universities to the consortium,” Liu said. According to Liu, this marks the first time a paper on autonomous vehicles has been published in the magazine.