Category: Self-driving

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.

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.

“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.

“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.”

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…

… 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:

1. authorised automated vehicles will achieve a level of safety equivalent to, or higher than, that of careful and competent human drivers, and
2. 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.  

In the week which saw an undisputed heavyweight champion crowned for the first time this century, Cars of the Future interviewed one of self-driving’s most vocal critics, Michael DeKort. Like Oleksandr Usyk, we never duck a challenge!

A winner of the IEEE Barus Ethics Award, and member of the SAE On-Road Autonomous Driving Validation & Verification Task Force, DeKort shot to prominence in America in 2006, when, as an engineering project manager at Lockheed Martin, he posted a whistleblowing video about the company’s Deepwater system.

“I’m not against automotive autonomy, I’m against incompetent and unsafe autonomy,” he began. “If somebody wants to have legitimate and safe self-driving, actually, I’m your best friend.”

An unexpected start. “So, you’re a fan of the slower, more sensible approach we’re taking here in the UK?” we queried.

“No, the UK is just doing less of a very bad thing. I believe there are use cases for autonomy, maybe helping people who can’t or shouldn’t drive, or cutting down on the number of vehicles on the road, and the military side, but let’s try not to injure or kill people needlessly trying to get to level 4. And, while we’re at it, level 3 shouldn’t even exist.

“There’s a huge over-reliance on AI when all we have is pattern recognition. No matter how you slice it. In a lot of cases, it’s at a pixel level. In order to recognise something, the system has to experience a huge amount of variations of objects in various scenarios.

“There’s no general artificial intelligence, there’s no inference, it is basically trial and error. In the meantime, you’re using humans as guinea pigs when, actually, a human that’s not drunk, not distracted, not asleep, is pretty darn good at driving.

Off-road self-driving

“If you do mining or farming with autonomous vehicles then fine, because you can get through the use cases in testing. If they detect an object that shouldn’t be there, they just stop, and probably then somebody remote controls them out of the way.”

“What about shuttles on dedicated lanes?” we asked. “That’s basically a monorail without the rail – it has infrastructure around it – a cordoned off area where only certain people are allowed to go, and that’s factored in.

“The public road network is different. There are countless variations in the environment – material differences, colour differences blah, blah. The point is you can’t get the testing workload down enough.

“You can pick any spot near your house and you will never see level 4 there in your lifetime because there are too many variables. A city like London, forget it! And don’t even get me started on autonomous aircraft without a pilot’s seat, that’s insane.

Self-driving’s perfect storm

“Right now, the autonomous vehicle industry is in a perfect storm. They can’t get enough real-world testing data, and the simulations can’t run complex enough models.

“Most autonomous vehicle makers don’t even model the perception system, they skip over it and feed their own data into the planning system. That’s not proper systems engineering.

“Crash scenarios are not edge cases automatically. That is nonsense. They use it as an excuse, like this thing is so rare. There’s been a lot of coverage about how robotaxis have problems making unprotected left turns. That’s not an edge case. It’s higher risk, but it’s something that human drivers do all the time.

“Look at all the executives from the failed autonomous vehicle makers who have left the industry. Why? Because they realise they can’t get to where they want to, to level 4. So, they go off to different use cases.

“A lot of senior people in this industry have blocked me. They don’t address my point that this technology is not viable, and by putting it on the road we risk harming people for no reason. Tell me why I’m incorrect.”

DeKort has thrown down the gauntlet, would anyone care to pick it up?

Thanks to Attentie Attentie for the boxing ring pic.

The Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC) race team invited Cars of the Future to Goodwood on Sunday 7 July to witness final testing ahead of its self-driving hill climb record attempt at the Festival of Speed 2024.

Working closely with Vodafone for on-site connectivity, a new version of the 192mph PoliMOVE car – the reigning autonomous land speed world record holder – successfully completed a series of increasingly rapid test runs, as you can see here…

Sponsored by Bridgestone and developed by the Politecnico university in Milan, the University of Alabama and Michigan State University, PoliMOVE now boasts a Dallara AV-24 chassis, 4-cylinder Honda engine, upgraded hardware (including 4 Luminar Iris lidar units, 6 cameras and 2 GPS), and a significantly improved software stack.

With safety paramount and weather permitting, the team expects to beat the current Festival of Speed (FOS) mark of 66.96s, achieved by the now defunct Roborace team back in 2018.

Self-driving challenge

Commenting on the unique demands of the narrow track, Paul Mitchell, IAC President, said: “Unlike the familiar ovals and F1 road courses, Goodwood’s famous Hillclimb will challenge the precision of sensor perception, GPS localisation, vehicle dynamics, and path planning in new ways, providing a historical backdrop to showcase the future of high-speed autonomous mobility.”

The event forms part of Goodwood’s FOS Tech strategy, bringing together all future mobility content, along with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning programmes for 11-16 year-olds.

FOS founder, The Duke of Richmond, said: “This year, with our new FOS Tech ethos, visitors to the Festival of Speed can experience the work of groundbreaking innovators and their vision for tomorrow’s world.”

PoliMOVE has provisionally been allocated a slot in Batch 2 on each of the four days. For scheduled track times, see the Festival of Speed website

Following his talk on safe and responsible self-driving rollout at the SMMT’s Connected 2024 event, we asked Peter Hafmar, Head of Autonomous Solutions at Scania, to expand on his groundbreaking work.

PH: “I started in the people transport area, more bus-related, at the height of self-driving hype in 2015-16, when everyone believed it was all going to happen immediately! Then I moved into the taxi pod side of things, and for the last three years I’ve been at Scania, working on the two closest to market segments – on-road hub-to-hub goods transport and mining applications.

Self-driving mining

“In mining, we have a development agreement with British-Australian multinational, Rio Tinto, for an open pit rigid tractor solution. We’ve been working on it for quite a while and have come so far we’re now opening up the order books to other customers, first in Australia and then other continents, probably South America next.

“A lot of mines are very remote, so there’s complexity in getting people able to operate vehicles there, but the main push is safety. Mining customers are extremely safety conscious. If you can remove people from hazardous situations, you do so. We’ve also found we can downsize the size of tractors and mine in a more efficient way.

Self-driving hub-to-hub

“For the hub-to-hub, we’ve been driving on public roads since 2021, so our development curve is quite steep. We’ve been driving in different countries, but our main drive is now in Sweden, working with our US-based software stack partner, Plus.

“We’re in dialogue with several customers about starting operations, moving their goods from one of their terminals to another completely autonomously, but with a safety driver. We’re getting to a point with the technology now where we need to focus on the integrations you need in the customer’s data flows – what communications you want to have with their management system so everything is integrated in the right way.

“The biggest difference for us between hub-to-hub and mining is that with the on-road project we have a software stack partner, whereas for the mining segment we’re doing everything ourselves. The technology in the confined area is more rules based, whereas on-road involves more AI solutions – how you interact with the hardware, sensors and computing side. There’s a lot of learning we can bring in from the mining segment about full self-driving operations, without a safety driver.

“Scania is a well-established European company with a really good set of values, traditionally very focused on truck hardware. Today, we also develop state-of-the-art software, and are embracing all these transformative modern technologies. It’s pretty cool.

“As to how deployment will happen, people services in cities like London or Stockholm will take time, not only because of the complexity of the infrastructure, but also the difficulties in accounting for free will. How do you take payment? How do you get people to sit if they insist on standing?  How do you stop them holding a door open when they shouldn’t? There’s so much to consider. That’s why industrial applications and hub-to-hub freight will come first.”