Over the course of a year, the owners of a plot of undeveloped land at the Raymond L. Flynn Marine Park hosted autonomous car testing in a controlled environment.
“We think it’s a great adventure, we think it’s a great idea, and if an opportunity comes and we have a location where we could do it again, we’d do it in a heartbeat,” said Tom Miller, vice president of Kavanaugh Advisory Group. “We allowed them to use a portion of our site just to test the car — it was a worthy endeavor.”
Kavanaugh is developing what will become Innovation Square, a two-phase 360,000-square-foot building complex that will house office, lab and research and development space.
But before workers recently broke ground at the Tide Street site, Miller said the fact that it had been paved for a past Cirque du Soleil performance made the area a perfect location for self-driving car testing.
City and state transportation officials have said they are working on a set of regulations and an application process to allow companies to test autonomous vehicles on public roads. Both have said it is possible on-road testing could begin this year, and a MassDOT spokesman said more information will be released in the coming weeks.
Earlier this year, the Perkins School for the Blind hosted some tests and workshops aimed at studying self-driving cars and how they could benefit the blind.
“The whole idea of self-driving vehicles is really important to the blind community,” said Bill Oates, vice president of Perkins Solutions, the school’s technology arm. “We spend so much of our time trying to support things that improve independence and mobility, and the concept of self-driving vehicles is transformative.”
Other testing has been conducted at Devens, on a swath of state-owned land that is being modified for autonomous vehicle testing.
Only one company — Optimus Ride — has publicly said it is testing in the Bay State, but there are several others either preparing or on the cusp of running tests here.
Although Toyota’s $25 million collaboration with MIT has a fleet of vehicles with sensors and mapping technology driving around Cambridge, a spokeswoman said the company has not yet done any autonomous tests. Still, that mapping process is a first and necessary step so self-driving cars know what is supposed to be on the streets.
In nearby Somerville, a partnership between Assembly Square and Audi is close to beginning, according to the city.
Massachusetts is seen by many in the industry as an ideal place to test because of its complex streets, unpredictable drivers and rough weather.
©2016 the Boston Herald. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
