STARKVILLE — Showcasing its groundbreaking work in autonomous vehicles, Mississippi State University hosted the 7th International Symposium on Advanced Vehicle Technology earlier this month.

The symposium brought together researchers from around the world to share their latest work on the future of vehicles. The event, held at MSU’s Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems, included sessions on modeling and simulation, vehicle sensors, human-AI interactions, next-generation traffic safety, lightweight materials and batteries, nature-inspired intelligence, and more.

“This is an exciting time as new technologies allow us to reimagine how we interact with vehicles and how our vehicles interact with the world around them,” said Daniel Carruth, CAVS associate director for advanced vehicle systems. “This symposium brings together experts from across the globe, all working to solve different mobility challenges. We are proud to host this international gathering on campus.”

The symposium included tours of CAVS and the center’s 55-acre autonomous vehicle proving ground. Renovated this year, the proving ground allows researchers to test autonomous vehicles and the software powering them in an off-road environment. The research has several military applications and has led to collaborations with the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Christopher Goodin, CAVS associate research professor, highlighted the development of the MSU Autonomous Vehicle Simulator, or MAVS. The software enables simulation of off-road, autonomous ground vehicles. It can be scaled using high-performance computing, allowing for thousands of concurrent simulated experiments.

Goodin said MAVS addresses several use cases, including detecting obstacles hidden by dense vegetation, optimizing sensor placement, and finding paths. It also can simulate teamwork among multiple vehicles in off-road environments.

“This lets us see decentralized control of a group of vehicles in off-road settings,” Goodin said. “It allows us to simulate thousands of variables that would be cost prohibitive to replicate in the real world.”

Carruth noted that MSU is engaging students at K-12 and college levels to help prepare a workforce capable of designing and operating autonomous vehicles for industries such as agriculture and manufacturing. The MSU-developed NATURE (Navigating All Terrains Using Robotic Exploration) open-source software provides a full suite of algorithms for autonomous off-road navigation.

“We want a software stack that shows students how these systems can fulfill real-world needs, such as a farmer navigating a dirt road or utilities inspecting safety equipment,” Carruth said.

The organizing committee for the symposium included representatives from MSU, Japan’s Nihon University and Nagoya University, Thailand’s Rajamangala University of Technology Thanyaburi, and the Illinois Institute of Technology.

For more information on CAVS, visit www.cavs.msstate.edu.