INSIGHT | Hello Spring!

A year ago this month, our lives were uprooted as we began the battle against COVID-19. Lockdowns. Quarantines. Social distancing. Face masks. Sadly, hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost. While our fight against the pandemic is not yet over, there is light, and hope, at the end of the tunnel with the growing availability of vaccines.

So much has changed in our lives at home and at work. We don't know what our "new normal" might be. But much good work continues to be done, despite the pandemic. In this edition of Mcity Insight, we share stories about what Mcity has accomplished in the last few months, as well as others involved in transportation and mobility work at the University of Michigan. We hope you enjoy it.

U-M’s new Ford Motor Company Robotics Building is the new hub of the U-M Robotics Institute.

The first three floors of the new building hold custom U-M research labs for robots that fly, walk, roll and augment the human body—as well as classrooms, offices and makerspaces.

The fourth floor houses Ford’s first robotics and mobility research lab on a university campus, as well as 100 Ford researchers and engineers.

The facility includes high-bay garage space for self-driving cars and is just down the road from the Mcity Test Facility. Ford is a founding member of Mcity's Leadership Circle of industry partners.

The 2021 cohort of the TechLab at Mcity program got started in January with a -- what else? -- remote video conference.

The entire 2021 cohort of two dozen students and mentors from each of six startup companies joined the event as well as alumni of the program, and representatives from several University of Michigan academic and research units, the state of Michigan, and others. Trevor Pawl, the state of Michigan's chief mobility officer spoke to the students about Michigan's vision for future mobility.

TechLab at Mcity gives undergraduate students an opportunity to gain hands-on experience working on real-world challenges in developing connected and automated vehicles. The 2021 cohort is taking on projects related to autonomous parking, inclement weather machine vision, sensor fusion, edge case simulation, and mapping.

Ann Arbor, Michigan will soon be home to more than 20 “smart intersections”—capable of gathering and transmitting information in real time to connected cars—as part of a University of Michigan effort to demonstrate the safety potential of connected and automated vehicles.

The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration has awarded U-M $9.95 million toward the effort, which will be headed by U-M’s Transportation Research Institute. Corporate partners contributed an additional $10 million of in-kind funding.

Mcity at the University of Michigan is leading the transition to connected and automated vehicles. Home to world-renowned researchers, a one-of-a-kind test facility, and on-road deployments, Mcity brings together industry, government, and academia to improve transportation safety, sustainability, and accessibility for the benefit of society.