Overview
The consortium’s 30-month project plan, which is due to commence in April 2017, will shake-up both the transportation and insurance industries by seeking to remove fundamental barriers to real-world commercial deployment of autonomous vehicles. Key challenges the consortium will address include: communication and data sharing between connected vehicles; Connected and Autonomous Vehicles insurance modelling: risk profiling and the new cybersecurity challenges that this amount of data sharing will bring.
A major part of the consortium’s work will include the use of a fleet of six inter-communicating vehicles equipped with Selenium, Oxbotica’s cutting-edge vehicle manufacturer (OEM) agnostic software. As a platform, Selenium provides any vehicle it is applied to with an awareness of where it is, what surrounds it and, with that knowledge in hand, how it should move to complete a task.
A key challenge will be how to insure autonomous fleets of vehicles – and the consortium plans to develop a system that automatically takes into account data from the vehicle and external sources that surround it, for example, traffic control systems. The project will radically transform how insurance and autonomous vehicles will work together in connected cities.
The project will also address data protection and cyber-security concerns raised by international policymakers and law enforcement agencies around the world by defining common security and privacy policies related to connected and autonomous vehicles.