SINGAPORE — By July next year, some 100 vehicles on the grounds of Nanyang Technological University (NTU) will be equipped to communicate wirelessly with each other and roadside infrastructure, and get advance warnings of upcoming hazards such as road works and traffic accidents.

This will be made possible through the Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) technology installed on vehicles and 50 roadside units such as traffic lights and road works warnings within a test bed located at NTU.

Launched this morning (April 10), the NTU-NXP Smart Mobility Test Bed is collaboration between the university and Netherlands-based firm NXP Semiconductors.

The S$22 million test bed, largely funded by the Singapore Economic Development Board, will run till 2018.

The test bed will be scaled up in stages, beginning with the V2X technology to be deployed on 25 vehicles and 15 roadside units by the end of this year.

At the launch today (April 10), three vehicles equipped with V2X technology got things started by driving near the Nanyang Executive Centre while feeding each other with real-time data, and receiving data from traffic lights and road signs. For example, cars can receive data about changing traffic lights up to 2km away.

The test-bed will cover roads around the 200-ha NTU campus and involve cars owned by selected NTU staff and academia.