18 Sep Announcing New MetroLab Network Member Cities

MetroLab Network is pleased to welcome two new partnerships to our network: Chattanooga, with the University of Tennessee Chattanooga and Nashville, with Vanderbilt University.  MetroLab now includes 41 cities, 4 counties and 55 universities.  

Both Chattanooga and Nashville have long standing partnerships with their universities and strong examples of collaborative research projects. Chattanooga and the University of Tennessee Chattanooga (UTC) are partnering on three NSF funded projects focused on planning for autonomous vehicles, mapping and monitoring underground infrastructure, and focusing on health while increasing urban mobility.

The Autonomous Vehicle Planning Project will investigate fleet management in extreme urban driving scenarios and addresses the corresponding challenges for connected autonomous vehicles. Early demonstration and evaluation will be conducted by researchers at UTC and the Georgia Tech Research Institute.

The underground infrastructure project, in conjunction with MetroLab partners in the City of Burlington, VT, will research the use of high speed urban telecommunication networks to sense conditions and improve management and usage of urban underground utility infrastructure.  

The researchers focused on urban mobility are working to build a multidisciplinary team, including academic researchers from the UTC, the University of Washington, Portland State University, US Ignite, and community stakeholders to plan integrative research on health-centric urban mobility that will bring a new mobility paradigm in the context of Smart and Connected Communities.

Nashville and Vanderbilt University are collaborating on three projects focusing on emergency vehicle management, sensor deployments, and a transit app called Transit Hub.

Their emergency vehicle management project is using predictive methods that inform a routing algorithm, leading to reduced response times.

Another project focuses on embedded computers and video cameras to learn how distributed computing techniques can be used to facilitate more intelligent mobility decisions (for vehicles, bikes, and pedestrians) in a connected city. Transit Hub is an app that collects transit information from across a variety of platforms that help users while offering the city information about its systems.  

To find learn more about these projects, or to connect with the researchers, please check out our project library. We wish a warm welcome to Chattanooga, UTC, Nashville (Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County), and Vanderbilt University.