Skip to main content

TRL to contribute to new autonomous vehicle research programme

The UK’s Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) the, has announced it is part of a new US$17 million five-year research programme to develop fully autonomous cars. The programme, jointly funded by Jaguar Land Rover and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), will look at some key technologies and questions that need to be addressed before driverless cars can be allowed on the roads without jeopardising the safety of other road users, including cyclists and pedestrians. TRL is the on
October 23, 2015 Read time: 2 mins
RSSThe UK’s Transport Research Laboratory (491 TRL) the, has announced it is part of a new US$17 million five-year research programme to develop fully autonomous cars. The programme, jointly funded by 7998 Jaguar Land Rover and the 2220 Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), will look at some key technologies and questions that need to be addressed before driverless cars can be allowed on the roads without jeopardising the safety of other road users, including cyclists and pedestrians.

TRL is the only non-university research institute involved in the programme and will work alongside the University of Surrey, Warwick University and Imperial College London on a project to understand how distributed control systems and cloud computing can be integrated with vehicles. The project, which will be led by Dr Mehrdad Dianati from the University of Surrey, aims to design and validate a novel, Secure Cloud-based Distributed Control (SCDC) framework for connected and autonomous cars.

Alan Stevens, chief scientist at TRL commented; “The project will explore how increasingly automated and connected vehicles can operate safely and securely when connected to each other and, via the road infrastructure, to cloud-based resources. Ultimately the aim is to develop a secure framework that will enable the implementation of safe and robust semi-autonomous functions on future cars in the short term, and fully autonomous cars in the long term.”

Related Content

  • November 11, 2015
    A smarter path into the future
    The forthcoming Highways UK event at the ExCel in London on 25 and 26 November will debate the future of smart roads, what they will look like and whether they are actually needed, along with in-car robotics and communication with intelligent infrastructure. Daniel Ruiz, Managing Director at Imtech Traffic and Infra UK will be debating the many cultural and social challenges of intelligent transport systems with Isabel Dedring, Deputy Mayor for Transport at the GLA and others in an agenda-setting Highway
  • September 11, 2015
    TRL to lead project to encourage wider adoption of plug-in vehicles
    The Energy Technologies Institute (ETI) has appointed TRL, the UK’s Transport Research Laboratory, to lead its Consumers, Vehicles and Energy Integration (CVEI) project. The US$8 million project will examine how the UK energy system needs to adapt in order to accommodate and encourage greater adoption of plug-in hybrid and battery electric vehicles. The project aims to understand the required changes to existing infrastructure, as well as consumer response to a wider introduction of plug-in hybrid and el
  • May 24, 2022
    AVs need extreme training, says research
    AVs will be safer if they are given 'one-in-a-million' collision risk scenarios to learn from
  • December 9, 2014
    UK Autodrive consortium to develop driverless cars
    An Arup-led consortium, UK Autodrive, has won the UK Government’s US$15.6 million ‘Introducing Driverless Cars’ competition. Other members of the consortium are Milton Keynes Council, Coventry Council, Jaguar Land Rover, Ford Motor Company, Tata Motors European Technical Centre, RDM Group, MIRA, Oxbotica, AXA, international law firm Wragge Lawrence Graham & Co, the Transport Systems Catapult, the University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, and the Open University. The aim of the project is to establis