A test site on the campus of the University of Michigan might hold a glimpse into what our robot-filled future will look like. Set to open today, M City is a 32-acre playground for automakers that will test how a city filled with self-driving cars might function in real life. The $6.5 million landscape will pit the cars against suburban streets, highways, and rural roads, as well as unforeseen obstacles like traffic jams or pedestrians prancing across across medians (the test dummy, whose job it is to plunge in front of cars, is named Sebastian).
"We're replacing humans with machines and those machines need to be able to operate in a full, rich environment," the head of the Transportation Research Institute, Peter Sweatman, told Bloomberg.
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