Under the first phase of the CITIES Timanfaya project a team made up by professionals from Universidad Carlos III and GMV personnel have recently visited Lanzarote to map the terrain and collect data for the tourist route around the island’s volcanoes.

The “CITIES Timanfaya” project, led by Madrid’s Universidad Carlos III and the Spanish Road Association (Asociación Española de la Carretera), aims to bring in autonomous, electric and multimedia buses to run on Lanzarote’s tourist route around the Montañas del Fuego volcanic landscape in the National Park of Timanfaya.

This trailblazing R&D project is backed and driven by a consortium of ten Spanish organizations of acknowledged renown in the intelligent transportation sector. GMV’s particular role within this consortium is to provide the communication system, which will keep a track of the GNSS position at all times and pass on information from the various autonomous-vehicle subsystems to a control center that will run the whole monitoring system, also supported up by GMV’s inhouse solutions. This will enable the bus’s exact position to be pinpointed at all times, as well as monitoring its operation, detecting any incidents swiftly and coming up with the appropriate response. The hilly and mountainous landscape posed another stiff challenge, successfully met, in terms of guaranteeing unbroken communication between the autonomous bus’s onboard equipment and the control center.

The recent mapping of the Ruta de los Volcanes drew on differential GPS, stereo cameras and LIDAR equipment. LIDAR (light detection and ranging) is an optical remote-sensing technique that uses laser light to densely sample the surface of the earth, producing highly accurate 3D measurements.

The readings obtained will enable the Ruta de los Volcanes to be simulated in the tracks run by the National Aerospace Institute (Instituto Nacional de Técnica Aeroespacial: INTA) in Madrid. There, the demonstrator vehicle, which has already been put through its paces to prove its viability for use in the project, will be tested anew to assess its behavior in the tricky terrain of the Montañas del Fuego, the greatest technical difficulty this project has had to tackle.

This first development in Lanzarote has successfully prepared and set up CITIES Timanfaya for its first in-situ test in coming months.

This project will make the island of Lanzarote a worldwide beacon in top-quality tourism, operating at the cutting edge of technology and offering a unique tourism experience. The project has other knock-on advantages. Subsequent applications will benefit Lanzarote’s residents and its industrial and business sector (bus fleets and hire vehicles, vehicle components, telephony, technological suppliers, power companies, financial services, transport services, healthcare, etc).