JLR and EPSRC announce £11m autonomous vehicle research

Research to solve 'real-world' challenges for autonomous cars

Electric-powered driverless pod designed at the Transport Systems Catapult

Academics and industrialists are to work together on an £11 million research programme to develop fully autonomous cars, jointly funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and Jaguar Land Rover (JLR).

The research, which will take place at ten UK universities and the Transport Research Laboratory, was announced by secretary of state for business, Sajid Javid, during a visit to JLR’s facility at Gaydon in Warwickshire. Five projects were selected by JLR, who will be leading the collaboration, following a joint call with EPSRC that was issued earlier this year for research proposals that focussed on developing fully autonomous cars. Javid said that the “UK government has no intention of being a passenger in innovation” and wants to pioneer autonomous car technology.

The chosen projects will look into the use of radar and video sensing to interpret the external environment, road conditions and other road users; how drivers will react to new autonomous systems; how systems can be designed to adapt to the personal characteristics of users; investigate how the transition between human control and automated systems can be designed to best effect; how distributed control systems and cloud computing can be integrated with vehicles; and how data from intelligent infrastructure, drivers and automated vehicles can be used to aid interaction.

Dr Wolfgang Epple, director of research and technology at JLR, said: “To realise the future potential for fully autonomous vehicles, we need to give drivers, pedestrians and other road users the confidence that a car driving around with little or no human input is a safe, viable and rewarding experience. These collaborative projects will bring some of the UK’s leading academics together with our autonomous driving team to address the fundamental real-world challenges that are part of our journey towards autonomous driving.”

Winning universities include Herriot-Watt University, Edinburgh and Birmingham working on video sensing for car autonomy; the University of Southampton and Cambridge on understanding human interaction when designing autonomy in vehicles; Cranfield University and UCL on driver-vehicle collaboration; the University of Surrey, Warwick, Imperial College London and the Transport Research Laboratory for secure cloud-based control systems; and the University of Warwick on the co-operative car.