The streets of Peoria this summer will be a testing ground for driverless vehicles.
Morton-based AutonomouStuff will have two of its cars equipped with motion sensors and driving software.
CEO Bobby Hambrick said they have already spent a long time in simulation with an extensive computer map of the downtown area.
“We’ve been doing it for a long time already. We have been running all these algorithms through simulation. And now we are taking manually driven runs to prepare for the next phase of automated driving deployment," says Hambrick.
Hambrick says the most common cause of road deaths is not drunken driving or bad weather. It’s distracted driving. He says eventually autonomous vehicles will prevent those mishaps.
At first the vehicles in Peoria will have humans on board as monitors, but later this year Hambrick says they may go completely driverless.
