Michigan State University said this week that it is turning its campus into a “connected ecosystem,” with the aim of supporting connected and autonomous vehicle development and better understanding the human element of mobile technology.

The 5,200-acre East Lansing campus has been divided into five geographic zones by features: a “rural” area, an “industrial” area, two areas that mimic the suburbs and another section considered an “urban” part of campus. MSU said that most of the technology deployment is already complete, and that its “controlled infrastructure and active campus make it ideal to test emerging technologies for new mobility solutions” — which it said could include 5G, first mile/last mile transport and testing of automated and connected vehicle systems.

In addition to the technology focus, one of the major aims of the effort is to focus on sociomobility, which MSU defined as “understanding individual and societal effects” of mobile technologies. MSU researchers have are working on vehicle sensors and “multi-modal sensor fusion” as part of its Connected and Autonomous Networked Vehicles for Active Safety (CANVAS), which the university described as using “radars, lidars, cameras and advanced algorithms … to create ‘super-human’ artificial intelligence for autonomous driving in four seasons of weather.”