Planning for the symposium began more than a year before attendees arrived in Detroit. The event was led by Henry Liu, director of the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI) and Mcity, who served as General Chair, and Gábor Orosz, University of Michigan professor of civil and environmental engineering, who served as Technical Program…
More than 500 researchers, engineers and policymakers from 29 countries arrived in Detroit in June for the IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV 2026), one of the world’s premier scientific gatherings dedicated to intelligent and automated vehicles. Nearly 300 peer-reviewed technical papers and more than 100 student and young professional participants made up this year’s symposium, hosted at the Detroit Marriott at the Renaissance Center, one of its largest yet.
It was also the third major transportation conference to land in the city in June, joining the ITS America Conference & Expo and IEEE ITEC, and cementing Detroit’s reputation as a global crossroads for the future of mobility.
For the University of Michigan, the symposium represented more than a milestone event. It reflected decades of investment in research, partnerships and infrastructure that have positioned the university, and the Detroit region, at the forefront of shaping the future of mobility.
Planning for the symposium began more than a year before attendees arrived in Detroit. The event was led by Henry Liu, director of the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI) and Mcity, who served as General Chair, and Gábor Orosz, University of Michigan professor of civil and environmental engineering, who served as Technical Program Chair.
“Hosting one of the world’s premier intelligent vehicle conferences in Detroit feels exactly right,” Liu said. “This region has been shaping transportation for more than a century, and today it continues to lead the transformation toward connected, automated and AI-enabled mobility. Bringing together researchers, industry and government here creates opportunities for collaboration that simply cannot happen anywhere else.”
Orosz said the symposium demonstrated the importance of bringing together experts from around the world to solve increasingly complex transportation challenges.
“Scientific breakthroughs happen when people with different expertise and different perspectives come together,” he said. “The conversations that begin at conferences like IEEE IV often lead to collaborations that advance the field for years to come.”
For more than a century, Detroit has stood at the center of transportation innovation. From Henry Ford’s first automobile and the introduction of the moving assembly line to today’s connected, automated and electrified vehicles, the region has continually reinvented the way people and goods move.
Today, that legacy is complemented by one of the nation’s most comprehensive mobility ecosystems. Global automakers, suppliers, startups, public agencies and research institutions work side by side to develop technologies that promise to make transportation safer, cleaner and more efficient.
Just 30 miles west, the U-M serves as one of the ecosystem’s driving forces.
Transportation research has been part of Michigan’s DNA for generations. UMTRI, founded in 1965 to address the nation’s growing traffic safety crisis, has spent more than six decades advancing transportation safety through groundbreaking research in biomechanics, human factors, connected vehicles, data science and automated driving.
The university launched the world’s first large-scale connected vehicle deployment in 2012, demonstrating how vehicles and infrastructure could communicate to improve safety and mobility. Three years later, Michigan opened Mcity, the world’s first purpose-built proving ground for connected and automated vehicles, which has become an internationally recognized test facility for emerging mobility technologies. In 2025, UMTRI and Mcity formally joined under one organization, creating an even stronger foundation for advancing transportation research from discovery to deployment.
Together, these assets make southeast Michigan one of the few places in the world where researchers can develop new mobility technologies, validate them in controlled environments and evaluate them on public roads, all within a single regional ecosystem.
That vision was reinforced during IEEE IV26 by University of Michigan College of Engineering Dean Minyan Liu, who welcomed attendees and highlighted the university’s expansive mobility research enterprise.
She described “Mobility at Michigan” as one of the world’s most comprehensive transportation research ecosystems, bringing together more than 120 faculty members from across engineering, public policy, robotics, data science, artificial intelligence, medicine and the social sciences to tackle the challenges of tomorrow’s transportation systems.
“As vehicles become increasingly connected, automated and intelligent, we need research that addresses not only what technology can do, but how it can be deployed safely, effectively and in ways that earn public trust,” Liu said.
She emphasized that no single organization can solve transportation’s biggest challenges alone. Universities, industry and government each bring unique strengths, and meaningful progress depends on collaboration across disciplines and sectors.
“Events like this symposium are essential,” she said. “They create opportunities for new partnerships, new ideas and new perspectives. They remind us that while technologies evolve rapidly, progress ultimately depends on collaboration.”
One of the symposium’s highlights took place at center stage where experts led a series of demonstrations showcasing how cutting-edge research is moving from the laboratory into the real world.
The demonstrations highlighted how artificial intelligence, mixed reality and connected vehicle technologies are transforming the future of transportation.
In one demonstration, researchers explored one of automated driving’s most critical safety challenges: safely returning control from an automated vehicle to a human driver during an emergency. Participants wearing virtual reality headsets sat in driving simulators that teleoperated a real vehicle operating on the Mcity test track. As the vehicle encountered an unexpected hazard, researchers evaluated how combinations of visual, audio and multi-sensory alerts could help drivers recognize danger and regain control more quickly, work that could improve the safety of future Level 2+ automated driving systems.
The project was developed by four master’s students from the University of Michigan School of Information under the mentorship of Stellantis Principal Investigator Derek Fraser and lecturer James Rampton, demonstrating the university’s multidisciplinary approach to solving complex mobility challenges.
A second live demonstration connected Mcity with researchers at the University at Buffalo through a shared mixed-reality environment spanning hundreds of miles. While researchers in Buffalo controlled virtual pedestrians and vehicles, a fully autonomous vehicle navigated the Mcity test track in Ann Arbor. The real and virtual environments exchanged information in real time, allowing the autonomous vehicle to recognize, respond to and safely interact with remotely controlled road users as though they were physically present.
The demonstrations illustrated how digital twins, remote collaboration and connected simulation are creating new opportunities to accelerate the testing and validation of automated vehicle technologies while reducing cost and increasing safety.
Although the conference has concluded, the conversations, and the collaborations they sparked are just beginning.
Researchers returned home with new partnerships, fresh ideas and renewed momentum to address some of transportation’s most pressing challenges: improving safety, integrating artificial intelligence responsibly, reducing congestion, advancing automation and building transportation systems that earn public trust.
For Detroit, the month reinforced the city’s place at the center of the global mobility conversation.
For the University of Michigan, it demonstrated the strength of a research ecosystem that brings together world-class faculty, state-of-the-art facilities and close partnerships with industry and government to solve society’s most complex transportation challenges.
And for the hundreds of researchers and practitioners who gathered from nearly 30 countries, the message was clear: the future of mobility isn’t being imagined in isolation. It is being built through collaboration, and increasingly, that collaboration begins in Detroit and at the University of Michigan.