A new partnership between six Australian universities and industry firms is aiming to take bushfire rescuers out of harm’s way by fitting vehicles with ‘extreme-case’ autonomous driving technologies.
The Automated Vehicles for Rural and Remote Regions (AVR3) program is headquartered at Brisbane’s Queensland University of Technology, with additional researchers from, Swinburne University of Technology, Deakin University, Sydney University, University of Technology Sydney, and the University of Western Australia.
AV3R is centred around developing autonomous vehicle systems to work outside of traditional urban environments and instead be able to take on rough terrain with little visibility, such as situations faced by bushfire rescue crews.
In addition to the six universities, Ford Australia has come onboard to assist with the AVR3 program, supplying the Ranger and Ranger Super Duty to be the vehicles at the core of the researchers’ developments.
“Australia has unique uses for autonomous vehicles,” said Professor Sebastian Glaser, Centre Director of The ARC’s Training Centre for AV3R.
“What we want to do is develop autonomous vehicle technology that helps remove risk to human life in situations like bushfires, makes roads safer by automating monotonous driving tasks like those on farms, and frees up humans so they can do other work, like freeing up paramedics to deliver patient care rather than driving.”
According to Ford Australia’s special projects engineer, Jeremy Welch, the Ranger and Ranger Super Duty were designed with future proofing for autonomous technology in mind, and are already used without driver input for some mining companies.
“When our Aussie team was working on Ranger and Ranger Super Duty, we spoke to customers across heavy industry – mining, agriculture, forestry, emergency services – to really understand their day-to-day work and the exposure they have to harsh conditions,” Welch said.
“It was clear to us that these customers needed extremely heavy-duty vehicles, but we also saw that they could benefit from automation for risk management, productivity, and cost.
“We knew that developing a smart truck would make it easier to integrate autonomous technology for the next phase of Ranger’s evolution, which is automation.”
During development of the Ford Ranger Super Duty, the brand used its own robots to drive the ute on some of its proving grounds which would have been unsafe for humans.
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