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Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University Are in the Thick of the Automated Mobility Race

The Rust Belt metropolis has attracted more autonomous driving investment than anyplace outside Silicon Valley.

(TNS) -- PITTSBURGH — The brainpower of Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, the bumpy terrain and a high concentration of college students who don't own cars are among the many reasons this Rust Belt metropolis has attracted more autonomous driving investment than anyplace outside Silicon Valley.

On Tuesday afternoon, a group of journalists rode in the latest iteration of Delphi's driverless Audi SQ5 on a 10-minute course that included several uphills, downhills, curves and stops. An engineer sat in the driver's seat, but he didn't have to touch the wheel.

The ride was safe and uneventful, but there was no human guidance at work.

The small crossover vehicle has multiple cameras, sensors, radar and LiDAR that can capture a 360-degree view of the car's surroundings to ensure it stays on course and reacts safely even to unpredictable behavior by other drivers.

This week, Delphi Automotive and its partner Mobileye showcased Ottomatika, a Carnegie Mellon University spin-off that Delphi acquired in August 2015. In January, the partners will demonstrate the vehicle on a longer course of mixed freeway and city driving at the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Ottomatika’s software acts as the brain powering Delphi’s advanced sensor technology for autonomous vehicles. Together, they create a platform that enables vehicles to make safe, complex decisions in an instant. Mobileye is the Israeli-based developer of computer vision systems, mapping and machine learning algorithms.

The partners are integrating their technology, along with using a new computer chip from Intel, to deliver a production-ready fully autonomous system by 2019.

Ottomatika is just one company incubated at CMU's National Robotics Engineering Center. The company operates with a staff of 30 out of a modest office in a suburban office park north of the Allegheny River. Delphi is treating it like a start-up. Glen DeVos, Delphi's vice president of services, said the new company will find a larger home next year and he expects to more than double its workforce, mostly with software engineers.

Michigan has begun construction on the American Center for Mobility in Willow Run. The University of Michigan's Mcity test center is attracting automakers, suppliers and preparing University of Michigan engineering students with the robotics and software skills to accelerate driverless cars.

But Pittsburgh and CMU are in the thick of the automated mobility race.

A fleet of Uber's autonomous Ford Fusion hybrids can be seen on selected routes near the city's central business district and the neighborhood known as The Strip, a hub of weekend nightlife.

They are limited to selected routes that have been charted by 3D mapping. They can't just go anywhere.

In fact, human Uber drivers are thriving in Pittsburgh.

"I'd estimate that college students are about 90% of my customers. The other 10% are tourists and business people," said Jack Claus, who supplements his salary as the IT director of a local company.

Asked if he was threatened that the driverless Uber vehicles would eventually steal his customers, Claus said: "Nah. They'll know some of the short routes around downtown, but they'll never be able to figure out which bars stay open latest or when the concerts let out."

In the wake of the recent Steelers-Cowboys football game, Claus said within three hours he picked up 35 rides.

Yet Carnegie Mellon will keep pushing the technological boundaries. The university began working on the basics of automated mobility in 1984.

The university has filed more than 140 invention disclosures for related technologies and has created 14 generations of self-driving vehicles.

It won prominence in the robotics world in 2007 when a team of its students and faculty won the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Urban Challenge, a competition among the brightest engineering minds who programmed a range of vehicles to safely navigate a course with various obstacles. First place earned $2 million for the university.

CMU's relationship with Uber has been cordial but occasionally tense. In mid-2015 the ride-hailing company hired about 40 researchers from the school’s National Robotics Engineering Center, an action some media outlets described as poaching. Later, Uber gave the university $5.5 million to fund a professorship and several graduate student fellowships.

Since then the university has been awarded at least $11 million in federal contracts.

General Motors spent $3 million to establish the GM Collaborative Research Lab at CMU.

John Dolan, principal systems scientist at the Robotics Institute, talked about other projects under way, including household robots, drones and even robotic snakes to be used to rescue people in hard-to-reach places such as in earthquakes or war zones.

©2016 the Detroit Free Press Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.