A small model intersection that physically lives inside the ORBIT grid room at WINLAB, Rutgers (NJ). It is built to scale on the 120th Street and Amsterdam Avenue intersection in Morningside Heights, New York City — adjacent to Columbia University’s main campus — and is wired for model-car self-driving experiments (autonomous-vehicle perception, V2X messaging, intersection-management algorithms) tested in a controlled lab environment before any real-road deployment.
The intersection sits geographically inside the ORBIT grid room (it
reuses the room’s space and infrastructure), but it has its own
testbed-domain namespace minicity.cosmos-lab.org and is
reservable independently of the main Grid.
The 120th St × Amsterdam Ave intersection in NYC is a four-way stop-controlled junction that sees mixed pedestrian, bicycle, bus, and car traffic — a representative pattern for autonomous-vehicle research. Modelling it at lab scale lets experimenters iterate on perception stacks, traffic-signal logic, V2X protocols, and edge-compute placement without the safety / regulatory burden of an outdoor live road.
| Class | Resource | Coords | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mobile model car | car1 |
(2, 1) | The autonomous model vehicle, control IP 10.7.11.21, MAC ba:ae:ed:7f:e7:fc. Powered via Cm18 Unifi PDU outlet (pdu1-in3.sb1.cosmos-lab.org, port 7). |
| Corner node 1 | node1-1 |
(1, 1) | Generation-3 grid node, IPMI at 10.1.33.1. Camera / roadside-unit role. |
| Corner node 2 | node1-2 |
(1, 2) | Same chassis. |
| Corner node 3 | node1-3 |
(1, 3) | Same chassis. |
| Corner node 4 | node1-4 |
(1, 4) | Same chassis. |
| Domain server 1 | srv1 |
— | IPMI at 10.1.33.101, control IP 10.7.11.31 — runs the domain controller, edge-compute services, and experiment-orchestration code. |
| Domain server 2 | srv2 |
— | IPMI at 10.1.33.102, control IP 10.7.11.32 — second edge-compute / orchestration server. |
The four corner nodes (node1-1 … node1-4) are positioned to mimic
the four sidewalk corners of the modelled intersection and host the
roadside-unit (RSU) workloads — perception cameras, lidar, and 5 GHz
radios for V2X.
| Plane | Subnet | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Control | 10.7.11.0/24 |
Per-node control + management. .11–.14 for the corner nodes, .21 for the car, .31–.32 for the servers. |
| Data1 | 10.8.11.0/24 |
Experiment data plane for the dual-homed nodes (car + corner nodes + servers carry a second -d1 NIC here). |
| IPMI / chassis-management | 10.1.33.0/24 |
Out-of-band BMC reach for the four nodes (port 1 each) and the two servers (.101, .102); the car is power-controlled through a Cm18 Unifi PDU outlet. |
| FQDN | type | INF_control_ip | INF_control_mac | CM | x,y |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
car1.minicity.cosmos-lab.org |
node (mobile) | 10.7.11.21 | ba:ae:ed:7f:e7:fc | Cm18 PDU (port 7) | (2, 1) |
node1-1.minicity.cosmos-lab.org |
node | 10.7.11.11 | 70:8B:CD:BC:7E:F6 | IPMI 10.1.33.1 | (1, 1) |
node1-2.minicity.cosmos-lab.org |
node | 10.7.11.12 | 34:97:F6:2A:C3:58 | IPMI 10.1.33.2 | (1, 2) |
node1-3.minicity.cosmos-lab.org |
node | 10.7.11.13 | 70:8B:CD:BC:7F:3E | IPMI 10.1.33.3 | (1, 3) |
node1-4.minicity.cosmos-lab.org |
node | 10.7.11.14 | 70:8B:CD:BC:80:3A | IPMI 10.1.33.4 | (1, 4) |
srv1.minicity.cosmos-lab.org |
server | 10.7.11.31 | ec:0d:9a:7e:91:ba | IPMI 10.1.33.101 | — |
srv2.minicity.cosmos-lab.org |
server | 10.7.11.32 | ec:0d:9a:7e:91:9b | IPMI 10.1.33.102 | — |
The intersection domain is reservable from the COSMOS portal scheduler
under the minicity.cosmos-lab.org entry. Booking the domain
gives you exclusive access to all four corner-node positions, the car,
and the two local servers for the reservation window.
Typical commands once you have a reservation:
omf stat -t car1.minicity.cosmos-lab.org
omf tell on -t car1.minicity.cosmos-lab.org
omf tell off -t car1.minicity.cosmos-lab.org
# Boot a corner-node image (PXE)
omf load -t node1-1.minicity.cosmos-lab.org -i <your-image>