Transportation Researchers Receive $1.5 Million NSF Grant to Improve Automated Vehicles and Intelligent Transportation Systems

Jiaqi Ma and Bolei Zhou at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering have received a two-year, $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation to build a vibrant open-source ecosystem that can simulate how automated vehicles will operate in, and interact with, intelligent transportation systems. 

This effort, led by civil and environmental engineering associate professor Jiaqi Ma, aims to connect researchers in academia, industry and government agencies through a community platform named DriveX. 

“The project’s goal is to unify diverse groups engaged in intelligent transportation and mobility into a community with common simulation and data management systems,” Ma said. “This will facilitate a greater exchange of ideas as we work collectively toward building safer, and more sustainable and inclusive integration of automated vehicles.”

Part of the NSF’s Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems program, this grant is the latest of several recent federally funded projects headquartered at UCLA that explore autonomy in transportation.

At UCLA, Ma heads the Federal Highway Administration-funded Center of Excellence on New Mobility and Automated Vehicles, which studies the impacts of new mobility technologies and automated vehicles on the evolving transportation system when deployed at scale. He also serves as the faculty associate director for the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies.

The grant’s co-principal investigator is Bolei Zhou, an assistant professor of computer science at UCLA Samueli who specializes in computer vision and machine autonomy. Zhou is the principal investigator on three current NSF grants that utilize AI for transportation-related research. He is using open-source platforms to develop AI systems that can interact with the real world. He’s also received funding to study human-centric cyber-physical systems for assistive driving and other applications.