Driverless vehicles to be tested between Oxford and London in 2019

 

Oxbotica, the Oxford-based artificial intelligence company that has been bringing driverless cars to the UK's roads, has announced that it is leading a consortium of companies that will help cement the UK's reputation as a world leader in the development of autonomous vehicles. .
 
The DRIVEN consortium – which benefits from £8.6m funding awarded by the Center for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles and delivered through Innovate UK – is an ambitious project that will deploy a fleet of fully autonomous vehicles in urban areas and on motorways, culminating in a trip from London to Oxford. These vehicles will operate at level 4 autonomy – which means they have the ability to perform all safety-critical functions for driving and monitoring road conditions for an entire trip, without occupying passengers. Tests with connected and autonomous vehicles at this level of complexity and integration have never been done anywhere in the world.
 
This consortium's 30-month project plan aims to transform the transportation and insurance industries by seeking to remove fundamental barriers to the real commercial deployment of autonomous vehicles. The main challenges that the consortium will address include: communication and data sharing between connected vehicles; Modeling Connected and Autonomous Vehicle Insurance: risk profile and the new cybersecurity challenges that this volume of data sharing will bring.
 
Most of the consortium's work will include the use of a fleet of six intercommunicating vehicles equipped with Selenium, Oxbotica's software. As a platform, Selenium provides any vehicle on which it is applied the awareness of where it is, what surrounds it and, with that knowledge in hand, how it must move to perform a task.
 
The project aims to radically transform how insurance and autonomous vehicles will work together in connected cities. One of the main challenges will be how to insure autonomous fleets of vehicles, with the consortium planning to develop a system that automatically takes into account data from the vehicle and from external sources that surround it, such as traffic control systems.
 
The project will also address data protection and cybersecurity concerns raised by international policymakers and law enforcement agencies around the world, defining common security and privacy policies related to connected and autonomous vehicles.