UK to host world's most complex autonomous vehicle trial

Led by Oxbotica, the DRIVEN consortium will deploy a fleet of fully autonomous vehicles in urban areas and on motorways, culminating in an end-to-end journey from London to Oxford.

With Level 4 autonomy the vehicles will be capable of performing all safety-critical driving functions and monitoring of road conditions for an entire trip with no passenger occupancy.

According to the DRIVEN consortium, no connected and autonomous vehicle trial at this level of complexity and integration has ever been attempted anywhere in the world.

The project aims to remove the 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.

Part of the consortium’s work includes the use of a fleet of six inter-communicating vehicles equipped with Selenium, Oxbotica’s vehicle manufacturer (OEM) agnostic software. In use, Selenium provides vehicles with an awareness of where they are, what surrounds them, and how they should move to complete a task.