Dubai Congress Discusses Testing Self-Driving Vehicles Experiment in The Emirate Late In 2023
(AWP) - The third edition of the Dubai World Congress for Self-Driving Transport discussed testing autonomous vehicles on the roads of the emirate next December.
The congress comes as part of Dubai’s efforts to enhance its smart transportation strategy, which aims at providing self-driving journeys for 25% of its total transportation by 2030.
Transportation Systems Director at Dubai’s Roads and Transportation Authority (RTA), Khaled al-Awadhi, announced in Dubai that the pilot plan for autonomous transportation vehicles will be implemented at the end of the year.
"We will start with a limited number of vehicles. But this service will be available to the public for the first time. Then we will have an expansion plan during the next year," he said.
The congress witnessed celebrating winners of the Dubai World Challenge for Self-Driving Transport, led by students of the Heriot-Watt University, who won first place for their autonomous vehicle design.
Mohamed al-Musleh, Assistant Professor at the university, said that their winning project was focused on the experience of users of self-driving buses in Dubai in addition to information security.
"The future will bring us 25 percent of self-driving trips," al-Musleh, who received the first-place award on behalf of the students, said.
Assistant Professor at the Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi, Majid Khonji, who received the second-place award on behalf of the winning students, said that the vehicle they designed was provided with programmes and technology that was developed at the university.
"We used GPT technology to communicate with the people inside the vehicle within this participation, of course. We are further developing this project and doing more experiments on the programme so that it would be more stable," he said.