Are we nearing the dawn of driverless vehicles?

Titled What’s the reality is for autonomous vehicles and what’s the business model? and chaired by Elizabeth de Jong, Logistics UK’s Director of Policy, the session explored what conditions need to be satisfied if autonomous vehicles are to be adopted by the commercial vehicle sector.  

DR JO WHITE, DIRECTOR, HIGHWAYS ENGLAND

First to speak was Dr Jo White, Acting Roads Development Director at Highways England. As the operator of the Strategic Road Network, Highways England manages 4,000 miles of motorways and major A roads in England, carries about a third of all traffic and two thirds of all freight. White underlined Highways England’s key role in supporting the nation’s logistics sector and the wider economy.

“We know that connected and autonomous vehicles are coming,” White said, “and we do recognise that we need to learn about these and understand the impacts on our infrastructure and on our operations.”

Highways England references autonomous vehicles in both its delivery plan and its strategic business plan, which were published last year. Its three core imperatives are safety, customer service and to deliver the Road Investment Strategy.

Highways England has worked with the Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles on two trials of autonomous vehicles. The first was the HumanDrive project, which involved a 230-mile grand drive from Cranfield to Sunderland, headed up by Nissan.

“It was a huge consortium that we were delighted to be a part of,” White said, “We worked really hard with Nissan on that safety risk assessment. How does an autonomous vehicle navigate roadworks, for example? There were lots to consider in terms of informing the safety of that particular vehicle.”

It has also held successful freight platooning trials. This was very much about learning not just about the technology but also its human impact. “What does a driver think about using that technology?” White asked, “How do they feel safe?”

White’s final point was about the importance of collaboration. “Collaboration is really fundamental in making all of this happen,” she said, “and understanding that relationship between the road, the vehicle and the user.”

RICHARD JINKS, VP COMMERCIAL, OXBOTICA

Second to speak was Richard Jinks, who explained how his employer Oxbotica, founded in 2014 by two Oxford University professors, was now shaping the future of autonomy.

A pure software company, Oxbotica does not build vehicles. Instead it integrates its software with other people’s hardware.

“We built an autonomy software platform,” Jinks said, “so the vehicles that use our software can be any vehicle in any environment – in the air, on the road, down a mine, on a refinery, underground, overground, inside or outside. And that’s what we’re all about.”

While Oxbotica itself is only seven years old, the software has been developed over a 25 to 30 time frame. “This has been a long, long journey to get to this point,” Jinks said, “We’re a young company but the technology, formulated in Oxford University, is old. That’s why we’re about ready to go.”

Oxbotica’s model is to licence its software to vehicle operators or vehicle manufacturers, so its name will never appear on the front of the vehicle.

There is a spectrum of autonomy, which ranges from Level 0 (no driving automation) to Level 5 (full driving automation). Currently the highest level of autonomy available on vehicles to buy is Level 2. This is commonly described as advanced driver assistance systems or ADAS, which can be found on Tesla’s AutoPilot feature for example. Jinks stressed that Oxbotica’s software was Level 4 – high automation.  

“We don’t do the ADAS systems you see today,” he said, “That’s not what we’re about, we’re straight to Level 4.”

Jinks foresees the transition to autonomous vehicle to be more of a gradual evolution than a big bang. “Today, right now, we have a team with autonomous vehicles running around a mine. And that’s happening today. You’ll see commercial vehicles doing proper jobs in closed environments, and eventually we’ll get onto the roads. And we’re not talking ten years away, we’re talking about three years away.”

He qualifies this statement, however, by saying that there will not be any vehicles going from any A to any B without a driver, which is still a long way off. But what is coming soon is autonomous passenger transportation and self-driving vehicles on industrial sites.

Safety is a top priority for the Oxbotica team. “The idea is to make it safer,” Jinks said, “There are too many people injured and killed on transportation today. This technology will make it safer. We’re absolutely sure about that. But it has to be the safest it can be.”

The legal and regulatory framework is also an important enabler for autonomy and Jinks acknowledged that the UK government has been very supportive in this regard, helping it to bring trials to the UK.

A few months ago, Oxbotica announced its partnership with Ocado, where it will provide the autonomy platform for everything the online grocer moves outside its warehouses.

“From their yards to their hubs to spoke, and from spoke to front door or kerbside, and from kerbside into your kitchen,” Jinks said, “that’s the vision that they’re aiming for.”

On the passenger side, Oxbotica is currently working on a project to launch autonomous passenger shuttles in a European city by 2024.

“So it’s happening,” he said, “I hope you share the exciting vision that autonomy will bring to transportation and that the UK is at the heart of it, leading it.

“Our founders’ vision has always been that autonomy will change the world forever. So we’ll change the way we move people and goods forever. And it’s coming. It’s not if – it’s when.”

ZEYN SAIGOL, PRINCIPAL TECHNOLOGIST, CONNECTED PLACES CATAPULT

Zeyn Saigol, from Connected Places Catapult (CPC), spoke next. CPC is a non-profit innovation centre, set up by government but now operating independently, funded by government, the private sector and research grants.

“Our mission is to drive growth to the UK economy,” Saigol said, “by encouraging collaborations and knowledge transfer between academia, industry and governmental organisations.”

Addressing the reality of autonomous vehicles, Saigol said there were two sides to this. He illustrated this by contrasting the favourable conditions enjoyed by Waymo, Google’s driverless taxi service in Phoenix, Arizona, with a rainy night on the M5 in the UK.

Describing the road layout of Pheonix, Saigol said: “It’s quite a simple environment. That’s one of the reasons they can do it and the second reason is that they have a slight technological head start.”

Phoenix has plenty of sunshine, wide lanes, simple junctions, good road markings and relatively quiet roads, all of which make it relatively straightforward to get autonomous vehicles to work.

Saigol contrasted these conditions with the M5 on a rainy night in the south of England, where all you can see are a few red taillights. Autonomous vehicles’ sensors and radars will always struggle with the dark and rain to some extent, making it a more challenging environment for them to operate in.

“The short answer is that in some situations we can have autonomous vehicles right now, and in most situations we can’t yet,” Saigol said.

CPC has placed particular emphasis on the safety aspects of autonomous vehicles, including road regulations, licensing drivers and the regulations and rules that drivers have to follow, vehicle regulations at both national and international levels, and the UK’s early autonomous vehicle legislation – the Automated and Electric Vehicles Act 2018.

One early project it worked on for the Department for Transport looked at critical scenarios. Because there is such a wide variety of circumstances and situations and environments in which driving has to be safe, Saigol said it is far too complex to test it all physically with real vehicles, as that could take many years. Instead it focused on critical scenarios, developing a system for recording and managing those scenarios.

On the environmental case for autonomy, Saigol said it would depend on the amount of push that policy makers give it, and the speed with which the technology develops. “A lot of factors could lead to autonomous vehicles being hugely beneficial for decarbonisation,” he said.

He also maintained that the logistics sector probably had a stronger case for autonomy, because it can predict and centralise the movement of its vehicles better than operators of passenger transport.

MARK CRACKNELL, HEAD OF TECHNOLOGY, ZENZIC

Last to speak was Mark Cracknell, Head of Technology at Zenzic, where he leads on technology and the UK Connected and Automated Mobility Roadmap to 2030 to establish an industry-wide view of the future.

“When we think about what the reality of autonomous vehicles is in the UK,” Cracknell said, “it is actually quite a difficult question to answer. There are a lot of different perspectives.”

As an organisation that works with both government and industry, Zenzic tries to establish a common vision of where the UK is on autonomy, and two years ago launched the UK Connected and Automated Mobility Roadmap to 2030, to establish an industry-wide view of the future.

“It’s essentially a collective view from UK government, industry and academia, about where we want to get to by 2030,” Cracknell explained, “and then how we get there from where we are today.”

One interesting aspect of this roadmap is that it takes a cross-cutting view and recognises that it is not just about the technology and technology providers, it also incorporates the infrastructure owners, the road operators, and takes the legislative and regulatory framework into consideration.

“The things to consider when we think about what is the reality of autonomous vehicles is very broad,” Cracknell said. “One of the key takeaways is that what we’re going to see will impact our collective lives and affect us both personally and professionally.”

Zenzic’s 10-year roadmap has two phases. The phase we are currently in is called the enablers’ phase, which includes work to develop the technology and understand its performance, to develop the software, the hardware and their integration. Much of the work concerns understanding what it will take to remove the driver from a legal perspective.

“When you take the driver out of the vehicle the whole thing becomes difficult to understand, so the UK government need to know what legal changes are required, and how we enable this to be on the roads legally and safely, before we even get the question about the business case.”

Cracknell expects the enablers’ phase to tie up within three years: “By 2023, 2024, 2026 we start to get to a point where all these different threads come together. We have the understanding of legislation and we start to understand the business case. From 2025 we start to see the deployment of real services that are delivering real benefit onto the road.”

While there are currently many autonomous vehicle trials happening around the UK, the focus is now shifting beyond these into commercial operation. “That is where this question of business models becomes critical,” he said.

While he concedes that no silver bullet business model for autonomy currently exists, Cracknell said there are still evolutionary steps to go through.

“What we did with Logistics UK a couple of years ago was look at it from a freight perspective. What’s the evolution of how autonomy might help?”

From thinking about systems and services which help driver safety, the next stage is how to automate the motorway miles, enable drivers to clock off on motorways and potentially remove the burden of drivers’ hours. That could be expanded to a hub to hub approach, where goods are delivered from depots to distribution centres, in a more fully autonomous sense. At the backend of Zenzic’s ten-year vision is seeing goods delivered autonomously direct to the kerbside.

“You see an expansion of where autonomy can help,” Cracknell said. “How do we develop the technology to improve the way we do things now and then evolve our business processes and business models?”

Like Jo White before him, Cracknell believes that collaboration is critical: “We have big tech giants investing in North America, we have huge infrastructure investment coming out of Asia, we don’t have something similar in the UK. So how do we compete? How do we deliver business models which are effective? It’s around collaboration.”

The belief that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts is something of a Zenzic mantra: “In building the roadmap we have 130 organisations who are working in this space in the UK. It’s a significant number of companies.”

Zenzic believes the way it can move autonomy forward across different sectors is through partnership between OEMs, tier ones and infrastructure providers. “It’s the only way we’re going to see a business model that’s going to work,” Cracknell said, “because we need to radically change to invest in a technology whose ultimate benefit is quite complex.”

The logistics sector is one area where the adoption of autonomous vehicles may bear some early fruit, he believes.

“We know that government is particularly interested in this concept of zero emissions, and automated logistics is an area we’re seeing some traction on, both in industry and government,” he said, “So, if autonomy’s interesting to you and freight and logistics are interesting to you, then it’s the perfect marriage that’s coming.”

*www.logistics.org.uk/events/itt-hub

Published On: 08/07/2021 16:00:09

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