The Driverless City

by TODD STOLARSKI | October 19, 2015

With the recent announcement of three finalists for the inaugural $1-million Nayar Prize, the Illinois Institute of Technology is putting its money where the innovation is.

Among the final contenders competing for IIT’s reward is “The Driverless City”. With Tesla’s inclusion of their autopilot mode last week, we have seen that cars are increasingly connected. As the days fall off the calendar, those links will only become stronger. It’s readily apparent to all that autonomous vehicles are on the horizon, but can our cities handle them? Enter “The Driverless City” team.

The final contenders

The five-person crew behind “The Driverless City” is well aware of this, as well, and are taking the R&D one step further. According to IIT, the team consisting of urban planners, designers, transportation engineers, and architects, will directly “develop social scenarios, technical solutions, infrastructure prototypes, and model urban codes that transform city streets into 21st-century human infrastructure.”

Further elaborating on the significance of the Nayar prize, IIT has to say “today’s world is full of complex, multidimensional problems that require solutions; however, optimal solutions are often the result of understanding the relationship between humanity and technology or the effects of technology on human behavior.”

The main goal of the Nayar Prize is to “encourage and challenge prospective recipients to undertake breakthrough, innovative projects that will, within three years, produce meaningful results with a significant societal impact.”

The other finalists competing for the $1-million prize are an imaging system that would be used to will improve cancer survival rates, and an early development vocabulary builder for at at-risk risk children.

Team Driverless City: