To accelerate self-driving in the UK, Zenzic has announced six more exceptional SMEs to receive up to £100k each as part of its prestigious CAM Scale-Up programme.
22 self-driving innovators have been supported by the programme since 2020. This is the fifth ‘cohort’, and we’ve covered the journeys of multiple 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020 winners here on Cars of the Future.
The six 2024 winners, in alphabetical order, are:
Blueskeye AI – Nottingham-based company building clinical grade facial recognition technology for fatigue detection.
Deontic UK–London-based large language model (LLM) artificial intelligence to help integrate regulatory frameworks into self-driving technology.
Maaind – London-based company using speech recognition, computer vision and smart device readings to mitigate stress-related driving accidents.
Moonbility – London-based company using CCTV to provide real-time information about available wheelchair bays on buses.
Opteran – Headquartered in London, provides neuromorphic software to enable machines to mimic the human brain’s driving abilities.
Saif Systems – Cambridge-based provider of real-time safety monitoring software on proprietary hardware e.g. to stop systems operating outside of constraints.
Self-driving funding
Supported by the government’s Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV), and in partnership with tech start-up supporter Plug and Play, a key benefit of CAM Scale-Up UK success is access to the world-leading facilities of CAM Testbed UK, which now includes Catesby Tunnel and Tees Valley.
CAM Scale-Up UK 2023 winner Gamma Energy is now a partner in the Project Cambridge Connector on-demand self-driving taxi trial
Mark Cracknell, Programme Director at Zenzic, said: “CAM Scale-Up UK is not just about providing funding to businesses, it’s very much a wrap-around support programme which provides those successful with everything they need to truly realise their potential.
“Through CAM Testbed UK, they can test their solutions in as close to real-life scenarios as possible and accelerate their route to market. All the while picking the brains of some of the brightest minds in industry.”
For further info on the CAM Scale-Up UK programme, please see the Zenzic website.
Corey Clothier, Co-founder of ARIBO, will once again be on the judging panel for the Self-Driving Industry Awards, focussed on AV strategy, development and deployment
World-renowned self-driving vehicle expert, Corey Clothier, co-founded ARIBO in 2016 to assist new operators with AV strategy and help AV developers grow into new markets.
For over 15 years now, Corey has been helping global cities and pretty much anyone with a campus to realize the benefits of AVs – to reduce costs and risks by embracing autonomy.
“It’s not just about the vehicle, it’s about setting up the entire ecosystem, from field engineering and testing, to measuring performance and managing systems,” he said.
Self-driving projects
Recent projects include evaluating AV support for mining in South America, supporting automated trucking adoption with the Canadian forestry industry, advising on an autonomous bus for a US national park, and taking a fractional leadership role as Global Automated Mobility Lead at sustainable design and engineering specialist, Arcadis.
“We’ve also been looking into automated transit network applications, working with Dromos, who won your Design Award last year, and other great start-ups,” he said.
“Airside operations are also really interesting, and we’ve been working with airports, airlines and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to plan for and adopt automated vehicle systems. We’ll be making an exciting announcement on that very soon.”
Self-driving strategy, development and deployment experts – Aribo
Following Uber’s investment in Wayve, we ask: who will own self-driving cars?
Sounds like a simple enough question, right? Actually, predicting who will own self-driving cars takes us to the complicated intersection of the connected, automated, shared and electric megatrends.
For many of us born last century, a car will be the second most expensive thing we ever buy, after a house. With our hearts ruling our heads, we dismissed the sage advice of oil baron Paul Getty – “If it appreciates, buy it. If it depreciates, lease it.” – for the love of a particular model in our favourite colour.
These days, thanks to modern finance products such as Personal Contract Purchase (PCP), we get the best of both worlds – the option after three years to purchase outright or return it to the lender, and repeat. No wonder the UK vehicle parc hit an all-time high of over 41 million last year.
SMMT new car registration figures, July 2024
However, within the SMMT’s new car registration figures, there’s a notable trend: the growth is driven by fleets, with both private buyer and business registrations well down. What’s going on?
Access or ownership
A 2023 McKinsey Mobility Consumer Pulse survey of 4,000 French, German and UK respondents provides a clue. It found that 60% owned a car, and 80% had regular access to one – an important distinction, and demographics come into play.
As Doug Jenkins, Motor Technical Risk Manager at AXA Insurance, has pointed out: “In my day, passing your test and getting your first car was all about mobility. Young people still want to get from A to B, but they want choices – they’re not so worried about ownership.”
Temporary car insurance provider, Cuvva, provides some compelling statistics: the average car owner in Outer London will spend £3,502 a year on running costs alone (insurance, fuel, MOT, tax and maintenance), and 31% of London car owners use their vehicle less than 10 times a month.
The unsurprising result is, as Andrew Smith, managing director of vehicle rental firm Sixt, told The Telegraph: “We see customers now who come to us every Friday and rent a car just for the weekend.”
So, less outright ownership and better short-term access options already. Now, let’s turn our attention to how self-driving might change the game.
In his April 2024 industry update, Scaling Self-driving Technology on the Path to Ubiquity, the CEO of Oxa, Gavin Jackson, wrote: “There’s disagreement over the sectors to focus on first, and no international consensus yet on what constitutes a safe autonomous vehicle system.
“Momentum, however, is picking up. The UK’s new Automated Vehicles Act will lead to regulations overseeing the in-use safety of vehicle fleets, and a host of other things.”
Two important takeaways there. First, the ubiquity; once self-driving tech is proven, it will be everywhere – from privately owned cars to vans, buses and HGVs. Second, the emphasis on fleet.
Self-driving fleets
To answer the question directly, large numbers of self-driving cars will be owned by robotaxi companies (those with a UK No User-in-Charge operator licence, as per the Law Commission’s recommendations). Which makes Uber’s recent investment in Wayve all the more interesting.
“Wayve is building a ‘general purpose’ driving Al that can power all levels of driving automation in any type of vehicle, anywhere in the world,” said CEO and inaugural Self-Driving Industry Award winner, Alex Kendall.
“I’m excited to be teaming up with Uber to massively ramp up our AI’s fleet learning, ensuring our AV technology is safe and ready for global deployment across Uber’s network. Together, we’re excited to work with automotive OEMs to bring autonomous driving technologies to consumers sooner.”
Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO of Uber, added:“Uber and Wayve share a vision of reimagining mobility. Wayve’s advanced Embodied AI approach holds a ton of promise as we work towards a world where modern vehicles are shared, electric and autonomous.”
Shared vehicles, by their nature, are utilitarian, and rarely set pulses racing. That’s why experts like Steve Gooding, of the RAC Foundation, and Tom Stringer, Product Strategy Director at JLR, insist that self-driving will not signal the end of personal ownership, far from it.
“Are you really going to ditch all those bespoke choices, and the convenience of knowing the car is at your personal beck-and-call, because you’re going to be able to summon a self-driving vehicle?” Gooding asks.
Self-driving cars will clearly be an attractive proposition for those currently unable to drive. Ownership patterns will be different in urban and rural areas, and there could well be regulatory curveballs like road charging or incentives for multi-occupancy.
In any case, those with the deepest pockets will still treat themselves to amazing cars like the Rolls-Royce 103EX concept. For the majority, as with electric vehicles (EVs), fleet operators and leasing companies will shoulder much of the early adopter risk.
The luxurious Rolls-Royce 103EX concept with self-driving capabilities (credit: James Lipman)
Please note: the author produced an earlier version of this article for The Institute of the Motor Industry’s MotorPro magazine.
Cars Of The Future on an exceptional self-driving roundtable feat. road safety campaigner Meera Naran MBE and Oxa co-founder Prof Paul Newman CBE.
It featured independent road safety campaigner and trustee of Brake, Meera Naran MBE, self-driving expert and Chief Road Safety Adviser to National Highways, Dr Nick Reed, and senior representatives of Oxa including Autonomy Systems and Regulatory Expert, Bryn Balcombe, Director of Safety Assurance, Camilla Fowler, Head of Global Regulatory Affairs, Jamie Hodsdon, and co-founder and CTO, Professor Paul Newman.
To set the scene, numerous messages from friends ahead of the event referred to the likelihood of a crash on the demo – a timely reminder of the consumer confidence challenge. And here we had leading proponents of self-driving in the same room as someone who’s young son, Dev, was killed in a collision with a lorry on a smart motorway.
Independent road safety campaigner, Meera Naran MBE, had questions for Oxa
Naran, having also just had her first ever trip in a self-driving car, explained that Dev was passionate about technology, and cars in particular. “I see value in the potential of self-driving,” she said. “It means that, in 20 years’ time, my daughter, who is four, is going to be safer.” It wasn’t an average discussion. It was no holds barred…
Self-driving safety
PN: “We specialise in self-driving software – providing it to others, like the Beep shuttles in Florida – but we also run a small fleet of vehicles to prove our work in different environments.
“We think it is much smarter to assure a certain vehicle for a particular route, say the Number 7 bus, rather than claiming ‘We can drive everywhere’. From nowhere to everywhere overnight? That sounds like a stretch. Autonomy should run first where it fits best, and you get to ‘everywhere’ by doing lots of ‘somewheres’.
“Be open; admit that sometimes the technology will get it wrong, and design it to fail safely. Incidents like we saw with Cruise in San Francisco last year deserve transparency, an honest explanation. That’s why we have Oxa YellowBird, our canary in the autonomy coal mine, which independently monitors Oxa Driver to ensure driving remains careful and competent at all times.
Co-founder of Oxa, Prof. Paul Newman CBE, in discussion with Meera Naran
“YellowBird is all about explainability of Oxa Driver behaviour and is designed to support the AV Act requirement for in-use monitoring. The key question is: What data do you need to share with others to prove your vehicle is operating safely?
“There’s no intellectual property (IP) in the YellowBird output, but we will happily share data to demonstrate how and why events unfolded in a certain way. That has to be the price of entry to operate in this space. The safety bar has to be high. That’s what the public expect.”
NR: “Self-driving cars must be at least as safe as a good human driver, that’s enshrined in the AV Act, so we need a mechanism to hold them to account.”
Careful & Competent
CF: “The term ‘careful and competent’ has appeared in Road Safety Acts since the 1980s. There is some case law, but it has always been hugely subjective. Now, thanks to Labour and peer amendments ensuring its inclusion in the AV Act, we get to define what ‘careful and competent’ actually means for self-driving vehicles. This could deliver a step-change in road safety.”
JH: “Road safety is a global issue, but number of fatalities alone feels like a very blunt metric. The public expect AVs to be careful and competent, but what data do regulators need to demonstrate that? For example, the Highway Code says cars overtaking cyclists should leave a 1.5m gap, but sometimes it might be essential for the vehicle to breach that to avoid a collision. However, in those cases, it must provide data to explain why it made that decision and that’s what YellowBird is for.”
Oxa’s Bryn Balcombe with Neil Kennett on a self-driving test ride
BB: “In-use monitoring brings so many benefits. Not just blackbox recordings for crash investigation, as we see in aviation, but also for detecting and learning from near-miss events. As automotive transitions from a product industry to a service industry it’s clear that approval tests for the product safety will need to be supplemented with continual in-use monitoring for service safety – to ensure incidents that require grounding of a fleet can be detected and safety issues resolved before service resumes.”
MN: “I am encouraged by the focus on safety, and only using this for routes from A to B, as opposed to everywhere, sounds very sensible.”
PN: “That’s made my day. We call it route qualification. The other keys are transparency and explainability. When a fault occurs, you must provide evidence and demonstrate how you have fixed it.”
Oxa continue to make the case for increased mandatory data sharing to the UK government and at UNECE level. The fact they were so open with a journalist, an academic and a road safety campaigner speaks volumes.
E-Transit Minibus
As an added bonus, the last few hours of the day of were spent at nearby Culham Science Centre, part of the CCAV, Innovate and Zenzic-backed CAM Testbed UK network, and home to the Remote Applications in Challenging Environments (RACE) test facility.
There, we were given exclusive first sight of Oxa’s new E-Transit Minibus. With a background in motorsport engineering, project lead Holly Watson Nall explained that Oxa will operate the new service, as well as providing the vehicles, on a soon-to-be announced route covering both public and private roads.
“In the UK?” we asked, several times. Oxa would neither confirm nor deny, but it is right-hand drive so…
Neil Kennett, Meera Naran and Nick Reed with Oxa’s self-driving E-Transit Minibus
Cars Of The Future editor Neil Kennett goes self-driving in the UK, courtesy of Oxa.
At approximately 10.30am local time on Tuesday 13 August 2024, with an average left turn in a Ford Mondeo, I reached a momentous personal milestone. After publishing over 300,000 words on the subject, I finally got to ride in a self-driving car on public roads in the UK. Excitement level off the chart!
With autonomy systems expert Bryn Balcombe for company, the turn out of the Oxford business park was noteworthy only for the fact that the road wasn’t completely clear – there was oncoming traffic, but I’d have gone and the Oxa software agreed.
On-road self-driving
Within seconds we were taking the middle of three lanes up to a busy roundabout, pausing momentarily while an aggressive driver steamed up our inside. From there on in, it went remarkably smoothly. A-roads and B-roads, cars, vans, buses and HGVs, learner drivers, cyclists and pedestrians – all handled without fuss, nothing outrageous to report.
Oxa self-driving software – “Autonomy is available”
You begin by analysing every tiny decision, as if the car were taking its driving test. Yes, the technology is amazing, but most humans get from A to B multiple times a day, for years on end, without major incident, so that must mean we’re also pretty amazing, right?
Ross the cameraman confided afterwards that it was his first time in a self-driving car too. He agreed that the presence of ROSPA gold standard safety driver Tristan was reassuring, but overall felt very comfortable with the experience.
Oxa self-driving car with safety driver
So, there you have it; second top item on the bucket list, tick. Video to follow, along with details of an exceptional roundtable discussion and an exclusive first glimpse of Oxa’s new E-Transit Minibus.
Alex Bainbridge, Founder and CEO of Autoura, will once again be on the judging panel for the Self-Driving Industry Awards, focussed on commercialisation and customer experience
After selling online reservation service TourCMS in 2015, tourism entrepreneur Alex Bainbridge launched Autoura to build digital sightseeing products specifically for self-driving vehicles.
“I’m delighted to be involved in judging the Self-Driving Industry Awards again,” he said. “While the other judges have incredible technical expertise, I’m more focussed on successful commercialisation and the customer experience.
“These might be Cars of the Future awards, but for the tourism industry, particularly for Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) making decisions about vehicle purchases, this is a live issue today. Luxurious coaches pay for themselves over 7-15 years, and over that timescale we’re going to see widescale rollout of self-driving buses, smaller shuttles and cars.
Self-driving tourism
“From a tourist’s perspective, when you remove the driver, you need a new way to answer questions like: ‘What’s happening in town today?’ or ‘Where should we go for dinner?’. Our AI characters deliver tourism experiences both within vehicles and outside them, so they work for pedestrians and cyclists as well.
Sahra was the first self-driving tour guide created by Autoura
“We’re currently testing it as a consumer product in the US. We’re also in discussion with AV operators because distribution agreements would obviously make the whole thing more streamlined. Autoura now has 30 autonomous vehicle tourism experiences available to try using publicly available robotaxis such as Waymo in San Francisco.
“In the not-too-distant future, human-driven vehicles will become ever rarer and self-driving operators will be in competition with each other. They’ll have to differentiate their offerings, and that’s something the tourism industry has traditionally been very good at.
“Taking a sightseeing trip in a self-driving car, or a small electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, as opposed to a coach, is a huge change. The interaction can be much more personalised – high quality real-world experiences at a very affordable price point, all enabled by amazing connected and automated vehicle technologies.
“I look forward to highlighting those who’ve made the most progress across all vital areas, from software to regulation, since last year’s inaugural awards.”
Autoura – digital sightseeing products designed specifically for self-driving
In our Zenzic CAM Creator interview with Alex way back in 2020 he predicted “The transition to autonomous will start with CAVs running routes like buses”.
Last November we were delighted to present our inaugural Self-Driving Vehicle of the Year Award to Project CAVForth… a fleet of five single-decker, low-emission Stagecoach buses which have been taking fares in Scotland daily since May 2023.
FocalPoint’s automotive Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) tech for ADAS and self-driving
Supported by the European Space Agency (ESA), FocalPoint has developed a new Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receiver to demonstrate its S-GNSS Auto software.
Last year we covered how the Cambridge-based company’s S-GNSS Auto solution helps to improve positioning accuracy in urban environments, as well as being more resilient to radio frequency (RF) spoofing attacks – with clear benefits for self-driving. Now, thanks to ESA’s Navigation Innovation and Support Programme (NAVISP), it can evidence this in real-time.
Gonzalo Martin de Mercado, NAVISP Element 2 Manager at ESA, said: “We are very proud to have supported FocalPoint in developing their S-GNSS receiver. We are confident this technology will have significant growth potential in Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), and even in consumer markets like smartphones and wearables.”
GNSS for self-driving
Cars of the Future spoke to FocalPoint CEO, Scott Pomerantz, and VP of Business Development, Manuel del Castillo, to find out more…
Automotive GNSS expert and CEO of FocalPoint, Scott Pomerantz
SP: “ESA’s NAVISP is a key enabler for innovation in the European positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) landscape. This newly developed receiver will support our commercialisation strategy, underpinning IP development and providing that much-needed proof of impact.
“Being able to rely on the accuracy of GNSS is key for ADAS and automated driving systems. Our Supercorrelation technology has already won multiple awards, including the Business Innovation Award from the Institute of Physics in 2023.
“By determining the arrival angle of satellite signals, permitting only the line-of-sight signals and ignoring reflections, it will help reduce the number of accidents worldwide. All the major automotive manufacturers are interested.”
VP of Business Development at FocalPoint, Manuel del Castillo
MdC: “Applying for ESA NAVISP support and funding proved to be extremely successful for FocalPoint. The project ran for two years. We hit milestones throughout the period, and we have just submitted our final paper and made our closing presentation.
“The main goal was to develop our own software defined receiver to prove the commercial implementation of our S-GNSS software – our patented, chip-set level technology which enhances the positioning performance of a consumer-grade GNSS receiver.
“Our Supercorrelation technology has several functions in the GNSS receivers for the automotive autonomy industry. GNSS’s core function is to provide the essential cross-checking of the accuracy and reliability of the sensors, cameras and radars, which can become very challenging, particularly in urban areas.
“As the only sensor capable of determining the vehicle’s absolute position anywhere on earth, as well as the sensor typically used to discipline inertial sensors, enhancing the reliability of the GNSS receiver itself is a logical first step to help overcome the typical challenges facing today’s traditional GNSS receivers.
“Needless to say, in the automotive sector we want GNSS to be accurate to the lane at least, but often that doesn’t happen without our technology. Across many routes in inner city London, around Canary Wharf, where there are lots of very tall buildings, and therefore a huge number of reflections, in testing without Supercorrelation, many times the positions computed were on the pavement or even inside buildings.
“The first baseline of performance for our tests was a dual frequency L1 and L5 commercial receiver, which represents the state-of-the-art. The second baseline was our own GNSS software defined radio (SDR) without Supercorrelation. When applying Supercorrelation, the results were always within the correct lane, clearly demonstrating a level of accuracy that’s essential for advancing ADAS functionality.
FocalPoint testing: true trajectory (green) versus results with S-GNSS (blue) and without (red).
“Another core benefit we have been able to demonstrate is the enhanced urban accuracy irrespective of the quality of the antenna used. We can compute very accurate positions even with lower quality antennas.
“In many new cars the manufacturers try to embed the antennas for aesthetic reasons, which unfortunately can compromise the performance. The enhancement of Supercorrelation facilitates a sensitivity boost in the GNSS receiver.
Resistance to spoofing
“Finally, for advancing ADAS and self-driving vehicles, it is critical that the GPS is resistant to spoofing attacks, so rejecting those is the third major benefit that the addition of Supercorrelation brings to the chip.
“We’re now discussing a phase two with ESA to further develop new Supercorrelation technologies, including its application to Real Time Kinematic (RTK) and Precise Point Positioning (PPP) GNSS correction services. Early research has shown dramatic improvement of these services, but with ESA’s backing, we will bring these to market even sooner.
“The aspect of resistance to spoofing attacks could be hugely valuable as all cars from a given manufacturer could be constantly monitoring the environment and sharing this data between them, a crowdsourcing effort to increase the reliability of GNSS for automotive.”
Resistance to spoofing increases the reliability of GNSS.
SP: “You covered our strategic investment from General Motors last year and we will definitely be doing more testing in London because that’s interesting for many car manufacturers, particularly JLR. We’ve been testing in Seoul, in a place renowned for its modern skyscrapers and office buildings – an area critical to Seoul’s urban landscape called Teheran-ro in Gangnam, a challenging landscape that is local to Hyundai and Kia.
“We’ve also been testing in Tokyo’s skyscraper landscape, results that will be of interest for brands including Suzuki, Subaru, Nissan and Toyota, and also in Frankfurt and the Black Forest for brands including BMW, Mercedes and Audi. Of course we’ll keep testing in Michigan and San Francisco, home of US automotive OEMs. It is all commercially driven, to prove that we can overcome the challenges associated with GNSS for these manufacturers in their own test environments.
“Open sky is relatively easy, but the minute you move into urban areas, motorways with big barriers, or roads with deep foliage, you can often find yourself with reduced GPS accuracy. Similarly, if, say L1 were spoofed and the network went down, and you didn’t have an L5 acquisition capability, that could be a problem, so we need to be multi-band.
“The whole spoofing and jamming piece has been getting a lot of press and our three buzzwords are mitigation, identification and localization. This will be a theme for every car maker – to establish whether there was an error on their side that requires correcting, or whether it truly was due to a bad actor. In the case of the latter, how did that play out and what are the liabilities? FocalPoint provides the fundamental data.”
John Birtwistle of First Bus on the groundbreaking Mi-Link autonomous vehicle project – technology, terminology and passenger reactions.
John Birtwistle, Head of Policy at First Bus, gives us the lowdown on the Milton Park self-driving bus trial – their preference for the term “autonomous”, how the technology coped with challenging scenarios, passengers’ positive reactions, and the evolving UK legislative framework.
JB: “The Mi-Link project was very successful – the UK’s first ever fully electric autonomous bus route. Partially funded by Innovate UK and the Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV), it was the culmination of five years’ work by a consortium including Fusion Processing and Oxfordshire County Council.
“The aim at the outset was to determine whether the concept of autonomous vehicles could be applied to public transport, not in some sterile environment but in real-world scenarios with mixed traffic, carrying the general public in exactly the same way as we would with a conventional bus.
“The first route ran around the business park itself, a little circular service just to prove the concept. The second route then linked the business park to Didcot Parkway railway station, including autonomous running on a 40mph section of road in normal traffic. The third part of the trial used a full-size single decker vehicle, but that unfortunately developed a fault not related to the autonomous system, so we ended up going back to the minibus and running that for an extended period towards the end of 2023.
Mi-Link autonomous bus, Oxfordshire 2023
“We found that the technology worked very well. Unlike other systems we’ve heard about, it was able to cope with junctions, roundabouts and to keep up with general traffic. Initially it did occasionally display a little hesitancy, but that performance improved throughout the trial, which was extremely good to see.
“Just as important, the passengers liked it. Our project partner The University of the West of England did a lot of research to determine their reactions. The presence of the safety driver was key, not necessarily for vehicle-related reasons but for other factors such as personal security.
“Perhaps more surprising, the safety drivers liked it too. We went through a rigorous selection process based on their driving records and customer service skills, but we didn’t have a single dropout – they all wanted to continue. The final big positive was that the business park community were incredibly encouraging and supportive.
“In terms of negatives, probably the top one was our discovery that there was a greater need for infrastructure maintenance than we expected. We knew before we started that the white lines on the roads had to be clear and visible. What we hadn’t accounted for was the need for roadside vegetation to be kept in such close check. Particularly when it got windy, the vehicles sometimes interpreted bushes moving around as a potential hazard.
Safety cases
“In terms of the regulatory framework, we were pioneering all this in the UK, which was quite daunting. That fact it went so smoothly was due to a collaborative process involving the whole Department for Transport, not just CCAV, and also the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA), the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA), and the Traffic Commissioner, Kevin Rooney.
“We had to produce full safety cases for the vehicles, and operational safety cases for the different routes. At the outset, this was largely a self-approval process, but during the project the requirements changed to include an independent safety case review. That was an additional complication, but actually it provided great reassurance. There was very little we had to change so it was satisfying to know we’d got all the big calls right.
“We weren’t able to charge fares due to a condition of our funding, but we did trial the concept of fare collection by recording use of a £20 a year smartcard pass which is available to all Milton Park business park workers. That’s obviously fantastic value and all those passengers could tap on and off, giving us great information about the journeys being made.
Autonomous bus stop – Mi-Link in Oxfordshire, 2023
“With the AV Act opening the door to more widespread autonomous vehicle use, the most significant hurdle is now financial. For the foreseeable future we will continue to see a safety driver on every vehicle. The legislation currently requires a human behind the wheel to provide assistance to people with disabilities, particularly those in wheelchairs, so our operational costs remain the same.
“However, the cost of the vehicles and depreciation are major issues. They are effectively prototypes with a lot of very expensive extra tech. Until that’s productionised, you’re going to find it very difficult to commercialise operation without some form of grant funding. Level 5 vehicles supported by remote operation could allow you to significantly expand the public transport network – to run bus services in areas where you currently cannot afford to do so. But that’s a long way into the future, I suspect
“More immediate applications include depot operations, where an awful lot of time, money and effort goes into shunting vehicles between cleaning, fuelling and repair. Increasingly, it is recharging rather than fuel, so if we can use autonomy to hook vehicles up to a pantograph or an inductive charging system, there are potentially quite big savings there. Possibly autonomous technology could help us with schedule adherence and punctuality too.
Electric and autonomous
“The clean fuel aspect is important as First Bus will completely decarbonise the services we operate for the public by 2035. Already 14% of our vehicles are zero emission, and, although we’ve dabbled in hydrogen, we were only ever going to pick EVs for Mi-Link. The smaller vehicle was a Mellor Orion E bus manufactured in Rochdale and converted to autonomous operation by Fusion Processing. It not only looked stylish but was extremely reliable. The larger bus was a MetroCity EV, again, fully electric and built from scratch in the UK by Switch.
“I cannot praise highly enough all those in the consortium who helped us bring this ambitious project to fruition, not forgetting project manager John McNicol, all those at Milton Park, and Zipabout who delivered the real-time travel information.”
Consortium behind the Mi-Link bus with then Secretary of State for Roads, now MP for Basildon and Billericay, Richard Holden
Now that’s self-driving commercialisation! Aurrigo’s Keene sees business case for airside autonomous vehicles at 600+ international airports
In this highly anticipated long-read, Professor David Keene, Automotive Council UK board member and CEO of Coventry-based Aurrigo International plc, explains how he grew a successful self-driving business from traditional automotive roots.
Aurrigo CEO Professor David Keene
How did Aurrigo get into automated mobility?
DK: “I started what was, and still is, an automotive company back in 1993. So, 31 years of designing and developing products for some of the best-known premium vehicle brands in the world, the likes of Aston Martin, Bentley, Jaguar Land Rover and McLaren.
“My background is technical, in electronic systems and software development. Over the years we built up our expertise so that we could effectively design a complete vehicle from a blank sheet of paper.
“Around 2014, I thought, okay, let’s do something interesting to demonstrate our capability, so I got our team to convert a vehicle so that it operated with just a steering wheel, pedals and an iPad.
“It worked well. People were fascinated that you could unlock the car, access the in-car entertainment, and do things like turning the wipers on and change the heating. So, then I wondered: Could we remove the steering wheel, and the pedals, and get it to drive itself? How difficult could it be? Turns out, really difficult!
“Around that time, we became a founding member of the Niche Vehicle Network, a group of small UK car companies and suppliers including the likes of Ariel and Morgan. That caught the attention of Innovate UK, and, through them, the government commissioned us to work on the Lutz project, developing a drive-by-wire platform for a two-seater autonomous vehicle.
“We successfully trialled that in Milton Keynes, so the next step was to write our own software. Fast forward to today and our relatively small team of 100 or so people can design and develop fully finished vehicles running on our own automated software stack.”
How did you come to specialise in aviation?
“After Lutz, we built a four-seater called the Auto-Pod, and then the larger Auto-Shuttle. We trialled those in Cambridge, Milton Keynes, Scotland, even Eastern Europe. We were quite prolific, and our profile was rising quickly.
“Then, one day, something amazing happened; we got a call from a guy in the innovation team of International Airlines Group (IAG), who said: ‘We’ve seen what you’re doing with passenger vehicles, but could your technology move baggage or cargo containers?’
“Of course, we said ‘Yes’, so we entered into a contract with IAG and Heathrow Terminal 5 for British Airways. That was in 2018, and you’ll find lots of videos and press cuttings from that era. We were especially proud to win the Heathrow technology of the year award, and new opportunities opened-up from there.
Aurrigo at Heathrow in 2019
“In late 2019, Innovate invited me to attend an intelligent transport show in Singapore, where we met the innovation team for Changi Airport. Within 30 minutes we’d agreed to work together. We signed an agreement in February 2020 and then, in March, the world changed with the pandemic.
“While everyone else battened down the hatches, Changi did the opposite. They said, ‘Look, it’s going to be quiet, let’s carry on with these technology projects and see if we can get ahead’.
“So, we worked remotely developing our Auto-Sim 3D digital twin software. We built that all through Covid, enabling us to model how the airport operates today, and how it might operate in the future.”
What are the technical challenges of self-driving for aviation?
“The first good thing about working in an airport is that it’s highly regulated, the people are highly trained, and there are lots of processes, procedures and safety checks. There’s still a lot of clutter airside – staff and other vehicles like tow trucks and catering wagons – but generally it’s a very controlled environment. The second really great thing is the low speeds.
“We’ve been very fortunate to have stumbled across this niche because, in terms of commercialisation, that’s all the key things you want. When I started looking at autonomy all those years ago, I promised myself: ‘Whatever you do, don’t go into fast road cars, because that’s really complex’.
“From a technical perspective, airside operations are difficult, but they’re a lot easier than public roads. You’re much less likely to encounter a horse which has broken out of its field – all these edge cases you must solve in a car of the future… and solve really quickly because you’re travelling at 70mph on a motorway! Those sorts of things just don’t happen in an airport environment.
“Coming out of Covid, there was a serious workforce issue in that tens of thousands of ground staff had been laid off. In Singapore this was a particular challenge as the conditions can be harsh; 45-50 degree heat and monsoon storms to contend with. They were struggling to attract people back, so our business case really emerged.
“On top of that, a lot of the time, tug drivers are being paid to tow fresh air, which isn’t very efficient. If you automate that, you can take those valuable security cleared staff and put them into different applications.
“At Changi, we’re at the point where our all-electric, autonomous Auto-DollyTug can go into a baggage hall, line-up and stretch out its’ robotic arms, collect a container and pull it onto the vehicle bed, drive along a roadway to a stand where an aircraft is waiting, enter that stand, work out where the loader bay is, dock with it, and push the container through the cargo door, all completely automatically.
Aurrigo’s self-driving, electric Auto-DollyTug in action
“There are specific challenges in operating close to aircraft. The International Air Transport Association (IATA) say the cost of damage caused by ground support equipment (GSE) runs to billions of dollars a year worldwide.
“We’ve proved that our vehicle can do its job repeatedly and reliably, thanks to a load of amazing features. It not only goes forward and backwards, but sideways, left and right. It can twist through 360 degrees, or, indeed, whatever angle you want. It can lift and lower to any of the deck heights in the airport, on either the right or left hand-side.
“Until our vehicle, loading and unloading containerised baggage was considered very difficult while a catering wagon was jacked up to the top deck. Those jobs had to be sequenced. Our sideways capability means they can now happen simultaneously.
“And we do all this in very high temperatures and in very heavy rainfall. Our in-house rain algorithm enables us to operate in up to 50mm per hour of precipitation, way ahead of anybody else.”
Where do you see Aurrigo in five years?
“This year we have already added five more airports to the list with vehicles in the US, UK, Germany and Holland. The next phase of the Changi project is to increase the number of vehicles, to work as a fleet under our cyber-resilient Auto-Connect platform. This involves things like identifying the most optimal Auto-DollyTug available.
“So in five years, we want to be in every one of the 600 or so major international airports, moving baggage and cargo around autonomously, interfacing seamlessly with the aircraft and all the other manual processes and staff. That would be a beautiful day.”
“With passenger cars and robotaxis, you’ve got to ask: Where’s the business case? How long will it be before it returns some profit? That’s why we’ve switched our main focus to this aviation niche.
“We’re the first UK company to come from private ownership, with backing on autonomy from the government, all the way through to listing as a public company and expanding around the world with offices now in Australia, Singapore, Canada, and the US.”
Auto-DollyTug at Stuttgart (pic credit: Leif Piechowski)
2023 Self-Driving Industry Award winner, Dr Nick Reed, on Digital Commentary Driving
Welcome to #SDIA23 Updates, a new series exploring what our reigning Self-Driving Industry Award champions have been working on recently. First up: winner of the 2023 award for Research, Reed Mobility.
In this category, the judges were looking for examples of exceptional academic studies and/or market analysis. Funded by the Rees Jeffreys Road Fund, Reed Mobility led a project exploring public attitudes and expectations towards the ethical behaviours of self-driving vehicles.
Since the awards in November, Reed Mobility founder, Dr Nick Reed, has continued his work as Chief Road Safety Adviser to National Highways – including plans to reduce deaths and serious injuries on England’s strategic road network (SRN), and supporting activity in relation to connected and automated mobility (CAM), smart motorways and cybersecurity.
He recently became a founding member of the Department for Transport’s College of Experts, was appointed a trustee to the Road Safety Trust, and joined the Advisory Board of Partners for Automated Vehicle Education (PAVE) UK.
As if all that weren’t enough, Dr Reed also found time to update BSI’s CAM Vocabulary…
BSI self-driving definition: automated driving
… and continued his work with colleagues there to develop a technique for assessing automated vehicle (AV) safety performance – Digital Commentary Driving (DCD) – as he explains here:
Self-driving data
NR: The 20th century economist, William Deming, is quoted as saying “In God we trust, all others bring data”. This captures his sense that when it comes to important decisions, gut feel and belief are not enough; objective evidence in the form of data is necessary to support decision-making.
My work that won the research category of the Self-Driving Industry Awards 2023 identified that trust was the most important value to the public in their appreciation of automated vehicles and that this trust is encapsulated by four key attributes. AVs should:
Be governed by a clear, legal framework;
Be at least as safe as a good human driver;
Protect other road users at least as well as they protect their occupants;
Share data with stakeholders to improve safety.
These principles are enshrined in the recently passed Automated Vehicles Act 2024, but what will be the data that enables us to trust that they will be safe? There are many ways that this question can be approached. The Act provides some signposts, starting with two key principles:
authorised automated vehicles will achieve a level of safety equivalent to, or higher than, that of careful and competent human drivers, and
road safety in Great Britain will be better as a result of the use of authorised automated vehicles on roads than it would otherwise be.
These make intuitive sense but what objective data would satisfy Deming and show that AVs are adhering to these principles? Principle (a) is challenging because there is no agreed definition of careful and competent driving (although DVSA’s National Standards for Driving are a good start); it is not clear how we could determine that an automated vehicle is behaving carefully and competently and therefore what data we should be collecting in order to prove it.
For principle (b), the answer appears more straightforward. We could look at collision rates of AVs (i.e. crashes per distance travelled) and compare that to collision rates for human drivers in similar vehicles on similar journeys and, if AVs achieve a lower crash rate, we can say that road safety is better. However, there are nuances here too. Let’s say AVs were found to be 10% safer than human driven vehicles – would we consider road safety to have improved if utilisation went up by 20%?
Although each individual AV trip would be relatively safer than that completed by a human driver, the overall level of exposure would mean an increase in the absolute number of crashes. Furthermore, an AV service might attract customers who previously completed a similar journey by train. Rail travel is estimated to be 20× safer than human driving so shifting to AVs would increase the global risk of injury even if the AVs were significantly safer than human drivers on the same trip.
My work with colleagues from BSI to develop a potential technique for assessing AV safety performance may offer a solution. We looked at the ways that we assess the safety of advanced human drivers and the metrics used to assess safe performance of mobile robots. Bridging these worlds, we proposed the concept of Digital Commentary Driving (DCD). This is a standardised protocol for the collection of data from AVs requiring the collection of the data that an AV must be using in order to drive safely.
This includes the current status of the vehicle (e.g. speed, steering angle, brake application, accelerator application, current heading, software version etc.), perception of the surrounding environment (e.g. fixed objects, moving objects) and predictions of their future movement (e.g. desired future heading, desired speed etc.).
Since DCD data covers the essential features necessary for careful and competent driving, it cannot compromise commercially sensitive information about the way a vehicle is being controlled. There is no presumption over how this data is arrived at by the AV systems. DCD does not prescribe the hardware (e.g. an AV might use one or more of cameras, lidar, radar, ultrasound, V2X communication etc.) or the software (e.g. end-to-end deep learning or rules-based approaches etc.) involved – it only requires the sharing of standardised data regarding the perceptions, decisions and actions of the AV.
Furthermore, AV companies would only be required to share data on the performance of their vehicles with an authorised regulator who would hold it securely for analysis pursuant to safety performance.
Of course, the collection of DCD data in itself does not tell us what it means for an AV to be a careful and competent driver. However, it does start to provide a consistent dataset that will enable objective analysis of driving performance by AVs from all developers and benchmarks to be established that set expectations around what it means to drive safely.
This may start the process of building the trust so valued by the public – and would perhaps satisfy Deming’s expectation for objective data to support critical decision making.
