Skip to main content

FiveAI starts AV commuter trials in London

A consortium led by FiveAI called StreetWise is carrying out commuter research trials for autonomous vehicles (AVs) on public roads in London. FiveAI says the trials will aim to gather insights into AV services, which it says could offer a greener alternative to urban commuter cars. The software company is working with insurance group Direct Line and safety organisation Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) to carry out the trials in the boroughs of Croydon and Bromley. As part of the project, FiveAI has
October 28, 2019 Read time: 2 mins

A consortium led by FiveAI called StreetWise is carrying out commuter research trials for autonomous vehicles (AVs) on public roads in London.

FiveAI says the trials will aim to gather insights into AV services, which it says could offer a greener alternative to urban commuter cars.

The software company is working with insurance group 4236 Direct Line and safety organisation Transport Research Laboratory (491 TRL) to carry out the trials in the boroughs of Croydon and Bromley.

As part of the project, FiveAI has provided the reference software stack that powers all aspects of the self-driving system. The stack was developed and trained using a dataset from UK roads and cities, including London.

Additionally, TRL is assessing researching participants’ willingness to use and pay for a shared AV service as well as measuring their attitudes towards safety and trust. It is also establishing a safety case for the StreetWise project and generating an independent database of scenarios for simulation testing.

Meanwhile, Direct Line is providing research participants for the trials. The firm’s head of motor product, Neil Ingram, says: “As technological advances continue at pace and self-driving cars become a reality, insurers need to understand how that changes risk; cars will increasingly be controlled by software rather than humans.”

He explains that the partnership will provide Direct Line with insight that will help to develop “insurance solutions for new tech enabled mobility services.”

StreetWise is a consortium initiative funded by UK Research and Innovation through the Industrial Strategy Fund and part of a programme managed by the Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles.

Related Content

  • January 23, 2019
    Foretellix receives $14m to develop solution for AV testing
    Israeli start-up Foretellix has received $14 million in funding to further develop a solution which measures the safety of autonomous vehicles (AV) in a range of scenarios. Foretellix says its coverage driven verification solution enables developers to test AVs in hundreds of millions of driving scenarios. Ziv Binyamini, CEO of Foretellix, says: “This funding will help us accelerate the industry transition from ‘quantity of miles’ to ‘quality of coverage’ and broad deployment.” The company then automat
  • September 3, 2019
    Waymo opens AV dataset to researchers
    Waymo is making its Waymo Open Dataset for autonomous vehicles (AVs) available to the research community for free. Waymo is hoping the data will help researchers make advances in 2D and 3D perception and progress in areas such as domain adaptation and behaviour prediction. The company says each segment of driving data captures 20 seconds of continuous driving, allowing researchers to develop models to track and predict the behaviour of other road users. This dataset covers dense and suburban environmen
  • October 28, 2016
    New solutions for catching texting drivers
    Many countries have laws prohibiting texting while driving but enforcement is proving difficult – David Crawford looks at some new approaches being tried by authorities. Finding definitive solutions – technological, regulatory and educational - to the potentially lethal practice of people driving while using mobile phones is proving elusive, while the stakes grow higher.
  • August 26, 2016
    Vaisala: Weather data is vital for connected vehicles
    Vaisala’s Dr Kevin Petty explains why the weather will continue to play a big part in road safety and traffic management in the smart cities of the future. The world is becoming increasingly connected. Thanks to advances in information and communications technology, the cities we live in are becoming ‘smart’, with everything from education to law enforcement managed by integrated tech solutions in a bid to improve quality of life.