AutoTaxi is a two year collaborative project to develop a safety critical sensor system for autonomous vehicles based on the known limited and controllable environment of a guideway system. It will involve fusing data to allow collision & obstacle avoidance and automatic guidance. The sensing technologies used will be radar, video and optical ranging devices. These will be developed and tested in an open loop environment to enable safe and rapid development of the safety critical system. The project is part funded by the DTI as part of the UK Foresight Vehicle programme

These innovations provide important new capabilities enhancing vehicle safety and performance. None the less, all applications to date are limited to providing driver assistance and are thus far from meeting the original goal of fully autonomous driving. This is unsurprising since achieving safe autonomous driving for road vehicles is a formidable task given the complexity of the road environment and the multiple commercial and legal issues involved. However, recently proposed alternative transport systems, such as the ULTra personal rapid transport system, require vehicle’s to operate autonomously on their own guideway network. These dedicated guideway networks can provide a far simpler operating environment than the present road network. Thus the development of safe fully autonomous driving capabilities for these systems is a more straightforward prospect which, at the same time, represents a useful step towards eventual road vehicle application.

Objective

The objective of this project is to develop, test and evaluate a safety-critical sensor system. The new sensing system will be developed in order to provide robust detection of the environment around the vehicle, in particular :

• The vehicle position relative to track
• Other vehicles ahead and merging
• Obstacles on the track
• Vehicle Speed

Home - News - Introduction - Consortium - Publications - Links - Contacts