Look! This electric car drove 370km autonomously

The project, HumanDrive, is jointly funded by UK government through the Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV) and Innovate UK, and nine other consortium partners. The total joint funding package for the project is £13.5m (Dh64.7 million).

The test vehicles included Nissan LEAFs, featuring GPS, radar, LIDAR and camera technologies that build up a perception of the world around it. Using that perceived world, the system can make decisions about how to navigate roads and obstacles it encounters on a journey.

The research project has successfully completed two trials, a 230-mile (370km) self-navigated journey on UK roads – ‘Grand Drive’ – using advanced positioning technology and also a test track based activity which explored human-like driving using machine learning to enhance the user experience.

One of the key aspects of the project was to develop an advanced, autonomous vehicle control system that ensures a comfortable and familiar experience for customers in the future.

The 230 mile journey saw the car in a range of driving scenarios to negotiate country lanes with no or minimal road markings, junctions, roundabouts and motorways. The autonomous technology apparently worked well along the route to change lanes, merge and stop and start when necessary.

The second part of the HumanDrive project tlooked at how machine-learning Artificial Intelligence technologies could enhance the user experience and passenger comfort of connected and autonomous vehicles.

Pilot vehicles tested successfully on private tracks, also incorporate artificial intelligence systems developed by consortium member Hitachi Europe Ltd, which enable real-time machine-learning.

By building a dataset of previously encountered traffic scenarios and solutions, it can use this ‘learned experience’ to handle similar scenarios in future and plot a safe route around an obstacle.

These technologies were subjected to a robust testing process and developed using a range of facilities, including simulation, hardware in the loop, private test tracks.

The research also focused on advancing cyber security features in autonomous vehicles, developing testing and safety methodologies for testing and investigating the implications of these vehicles on the wider transport system.

The 370km journey saw the car in a range of driving scenarios to negotiate country lanes with no or minimal road markings, junctions, roundabouts and motorways.