38 PROVING GROUNDS
CAV test facility
for the UK
The UK’s Bruntingthorpe
Proving Ground, in a
design partnership with
Applus+ IDIADA, has been
awarded £4 million of
government funding to
design and operate a
new connected and
autonomous vehicle (CAV)
test facility at its site,
making for a total project
investment of £8.4 million.
The project will deliver a
configurable set of road
junctions, ranging from
smart motorways to rural
roads, all within a fully
connected environment.
This site will include
6km (3.7 miles) of
controlled highway test
facilities, complementing
the existing facilities to
offer a range of flexible
highway intersections. The
plan is that the site can be
used to test how CAVs
would operate at a variety
of UK road junctions, from
smart motorways to rural
A and B roads.
Applus+ IDIADA is a
consortium partner with
Bruntingthorpe Proving
Ground, and its
involvement marks the
first direct foreign
investment to the UK
vehicle testing and
development sector,
according to
Bruntingthorpe. It is
hoped that the CAV
facility will attract more
intelligent vehicle
development to the UK.
The UK’s fi rst automated parking facility
Horiba MIRA has built the
UK’s first facility for testing
and supporting the
development of automated
parking solutions. Named
‘Trusted Autonomous
Parking’ (‘Park-IT’), the
facility includes a multistorey
VehicleDynamicsInternational.com • May/June 2020
Self-driving vehicle test
facilities
Millbrook has opened its Autonomous Village, a
centre for testing CAVs that comprises six purposebuilt
workshops to support mechanical, integration
and software development for self-driving vehicles,
from passenger cars to buses.
With 70km (43.5 miles) of secure test tracks, a
private, 5G-enabled mobile network and supporting
physical and virtual infrastructure, Millbrook Proving
Ground is a great location for collecting data for
automated driving and safely challenging the
systems. Customers run a range of test routes
around the site, with varying levels of complexity
(including through moving test environments created
using synchronised ADAS targets), and can analyse
the data either at the end of the route or in real time.
The facility gives open access to all users – from
global OEMs and SMEs to start-ups – at all stages
of autonomy and readiness.
car park, on-road
parking bays, and parking
lot environments, providing
real-world parking
situations to support the
development of self-parking
systems. Challenges
within the self-driving
environment, such as
tight locations, restricted
visibility, lack of GPS (in
covered locations), must be
addressed during systems
development, and Park-IT
will provide a location to
solve those challenges, and
test innovative services, in
a safe and configurable
environment.
The parking areas are
co-located in the Horiba
MIRA City Circuit, a purposebuilt
‘cityscape’ test track
environment, which allows
verification of the transition
from an urban driving
environment into a
dedicated parking facility.
AV & CAV testing
/VehicleDynamicsInternational.com