As part of a three-year, $2.6 million dollar project between the city of Gainesville, Florida and the University of Florida, three autonomous buses are expected to begin operating on Gainesville Regional Transit System (RTS) bus routes in downtown Gainesville in late August.

Capable of holding up to 12 passengers at a time, the buses can fully operate on their own, but they will have operators onboard to start with once they hit the road in a few months.

“For the first phase, there will be a safety operator on board just making sure it runs properly, doing testing, answering questions for people who ride it,” says Gainesville's Assistant City manager Dan Hoffman, via WCJB-TV.

“But it is a fully autonomous shuttle which will operate in mixed traffic in downtown Gainesville between the downtown and the University of Florida.”

Hoffman says that the buses will be free to ride during the pilot phase, and they will stop at RTS bus stops just like any other bus.

According to Autonomous Vehicle Demonstration Manager Yigit Topcu, the buses are capable of going 25 miles per hour in this current generation, but being that they are still in the early stages of testing, they would like to keep the buses traveling around 10-15 miles per hour.

Each bus stays aware of its surroundings thanks to having multiple sensors attached to it. The vehicles also have a built-in emergency braking mechanism.

“The vehicle is essentially programmed to always want to stop, it's constantly looking for reasons to stop,” Topcu says. “So if someone was just for whatever reason standing in our way it would come to a nice gradual stop. It would pick them up from a distance and as it gets closer and closer it will make the decision okay I'll start slowing down, as it gets closer it will say okay I'm going to stop now.”

WCJB-TV’s Landon Harrar demonstrated the vehicle’s stopping mechanism, saying, “it doesn't just stop for people standing in the road. If you're going to run out in front of it like this, see, stops right on a dime.”