UK’s DRIVEN consortium celebrated for development of CAVs

The UK’S DRIVEN consortium is being celebrated for its development of CAVs at an event hosted by Oxfordshire County Council (OCC).

DRIVEN is an ambitious government-supported project that has developed a fleet of self-driving vehicles for use in the urban environments of Oxford and London.

The £13.6m initiative – with matched funding from UK Research and Innovation’ Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund and industry – has sought to address fundamental real-world challenges facing self-driving vehicles. It combines a wide range of technical experts in areas such as local authority planning, insurance, cyber-security and data trading.

The full coalition of experts include Oxbotica, Oxford Robotics Institute, Axa XL, Nominet, Telefonica, TRL, RACE, Oxfordshire County Council (OCC), Transport for London (TfL) and Cicero Group.

It has completed fully autonomous routes within the dense, complex urban environments of London and Oxford and completed a two week-long demonstration around the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford, London in October this year.

Held at Oxfordshire County Library, the event saw presentations from consortium partners Oxbotica, Nominet, Oxford University and the UK Atomic Energy Authority’s RACE. OCC was the first council to include automated vehicles in its Local Transport Plan and is keen to adopt and utilise the benefits of autonomous vehicle projects at a local authority level.

“We now have one of the largest teams in the UK utilising external and partnership funding to deliver innovation across many of our functions in Oxfordshire,” said Llewelyn Morgan, Head of Innovation at OCC. “Much of that has stemmed from initial days of working with DRIVEN partners so the impact has gone way beyond [the] CAV sector itself.”

The exhibition at OCC Westgate library will be open to the public until Tuesday 31 December 2019.