SINGAPORE — A self-driving minibus slated to hit the roads of Nanyang Technological University (NTU) by March next year may allow students to stop at canteens in hostels, and if all goes well, the later part of the pilot may see them hopping on and off anywhere along a 1.5km-route while using an app.

The air-conditioned electric minibus, which has 11 seats and standing space for four passengers, will run a loop between CleanTech Park and the university campus at up to 40kmh — twice the speed of earlier trials. It is the third driverless vehicle to be put on trial by the Energy Research Institute at NTU (ERI@N), and the largest vehicle tested by NTU so far.

On Monday (Dec 19), the university signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Navya, the French maker of the minibus, sealing a two-year partnership for driverless technologies. The open-concept golf cart and shuttle featured in previous trials were also by Navya.

Mr Samuel Mathey, Navya’s general manager in Singapore, hopes for a closer collaboration with NTU in the coming years. “It’s quite rare to have the authorisation to run autonomous vehicles on open roads,” he said.

The driverless minibus, called Arma, comes with more safety features than its predecessors. It uses a global positioning system (GPS) and four smart cameras to analyse road infrastructure. There are eight lidar (light detection and ranging) sensors, which can pick up obstacles in the surroundings, and the data is processed by the vehicle’s software.

The minibus can be remotely controlled during emergencies as well. Ms Krithika Kandasamy, research associate at ERI@N, said: “We’ve had no accidents so far. But if the vehicle passes any complex sites without a test driver, we can still remotely take control of it if there is any incident.”

Professor Subodh Mhaisalkar, ERI@N’s executive director, said that a mobile app would be made available for students to hail the minibus on campus. For a start, there could be three designated pick-up points, and later, the technology may be refined to allow students to set pick-up points anywhere along the fixed route — all through the app. “It’s in progress, but the concept that we’re going for is (to build) connectivity within the campus,” he said.

NTU students told TODAY that they would be keen to try the minibus. Ms Arpita Ajit, 24, a graduate student at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, said: “It’s something new and it sounds really fun.”

She took the shuttle on trial earlier this year and found it a smooth ride, albeit too slow for her liking. Agreeing, final-year communication studies undergraduate Clifford Lee, 25, said: “I’ve seen the older-generation buggies going around and have driven behind them before. They’re really slow and hog the road.”

Mr Ilmi Wahab, 26, a final-year computer engineering undergraduate, looks forward to hitching a ride on the air-conditioned minibus. “The one that I took a ride in previously was open-air ... it was quite humid that day. The new one seems cooler,” he said.

In the Government’s vision of a car-lite future, existing public transport will be complemented by shared mobility-on-demand services powered by fleets of self-driving vehicles.

With the launch of the NTU trial next year, researchers are a step closer to realising their vision of full-size self-driving buses running between CleanTech Park and the university in 2018, and then to Pioneer MRT station in the following year.

In October, the Land Transport Authority (LTA) and NTU signed a partnership for the first autonomous bus trial.

There have also been trials of self-driving taxis at one-north.

In August, the LTA partnered two companies — Delphi Automotive Systems and nuTonomy — to develop on-demand services using apps in the one-north testbed. However, nuTonomy hit a snag in October after one of its driverless cars hit a lorry in Biopolis Drive during a test-drive. No one was hurt in the accident, and the company has since improved its software system and resumed trials.