Skip to main content

Singapore builds on autonomous vehicle progress with driverless bus pilot program

singapore driverless bus pilot main
NTU, LTA
Singapore already is home to a fleet of self-driving cars that can be hailed with a smartphone. Soon, residents and visitors to the city may be able to choose a driverless bus as one of their available transportation options for moving around the Asian city. And we are not talking small buses here; Singapore is going big and rolling out two 40-foot-long driverless buses that are controlled robotically.

The driverless bus trial is the result of a partnership between Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and CleanTech Park, an eco-business park that encourages the development of clean technology. The pair has already worked together on driverless cars, developing and operating a self-driving shuttle between the university’s campus and the CleanTech business park. The shuttle has been in operation since 2013.

NTU will use its knowledge and experience from the shuttle trial as it develops its driverless bus system. The researchers plan to equip two electric hybrid buses with the sensors and software system to pilot the bus through the crowded city streets. “So, this autonomous bus trial is the first of its kind in Singapore that will aim to improve road safety, reduce vehicle congestion, alleviate pollution and address manpower challenges,” said NTU Chief of Staff and Vice-President of Research Lam Khin Yong to Channel News Asia.

Similar to the shuttle, the buses initially will transport passengers between NTU and CleanTech Park with plans to extend the transportation network to include the outlying Pioneer MRT Station in the future. Unlike the smaller shuttles which provide taxi-level service, the larger single deck buses are capable of carrying up to 80 passengers, providing city dwellers with a mass transit option.

The pilot program will be administered by Singapore’s Land Transport Authority (LTA) along with NTU. Results of the pilot will be analyzed by the LTA along with Google, which is known for its work on driverless car technology. Using feedback from the trial, the LTE hopes to extend the driverless bus system beyond its initial college campus route and bring it to additional transit stations in the city.

Editors' Recommendations

Kelly Hodgkins
Kelly's been writing online for ten years, working at Gizmodo, TUAW, and BGR among others. Living near the White Mountains of…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more