Telstra kicks off self-driving shuttle trial with NSW Transport

telstra driverless shuttle
Image credit: Telstra Exchange

Telstra says it has joined forces with the NSW Government’s transport department and a range of partners to launch the NSW’s first trial of a driverless vehicle.

The two-year trial will put a self-driving shuttle through its paces. Telstra said office workers in Sydney Olympic Park will be able to use the shuttle sometime next year as part of the trial. If the trial goes well, the shuttles will be deployed across NSW.

From the blog post:

The trial will showcase how the transport industry will be shaped with the advances in automation technology and the Internet of Things. The ultimate goal of the trial is to find the best ways to harness the next generation of driverless technology and continue to improve safety and reliability for transport customers and road users in NSW.

The driverless shuttle trial comes hot on the heels of another vehicle-related trial from Telstra. Two weeks ago, the telco conducted what it said was the first Australian trial of Vehicle-to-Pedestrian technology over a mobile network.

That trial, carried out in South Australia in partnership with Cohda Wireless and the South Australian Government, built on previous Telstra trials with V2I (Vehicle-to-Infrastructure) and V2V (Vehicle to Vehicle) technologies, according to a blog post from Telstra CTO Håkan Eriksson:

… [W]e can now demonstrate how vehicles can interact directly with pedestrians’ and cyclists’ mobile phones providing early-warning collision detection and alerts via an application installed on their mobiles.

We tested the technology using some common scenarios that occur every day in Australia – a car and a cyclist approaching a blind corner, a car reversing out of a driveway, and a car approaching a pedestrian crossing.

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