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15 “Looking at the trials now, they do look a little conservative, but they were put together 18 months ago and seemed a lot more exploratory at the time, but it is amazing how fast the technology is moving,” says Prof Reed. “We will be operating driverless shuttle vehicles, and we saw those on public roads at the ITS World Congress in Bordeaux earlier this year. They started out on a private road and then ventured out into traffic. “That’s quite impressive, and it’s very interesting to see how the public responds to the vehicles – some are frustrated by the slow speed, and there’s a lot of curiosity, and we are expecting to encounter the same things with the shuttles in Greenwich.” Bids to supply equipment for the trials have gone out, and decisions are due before the end of 2015. The bids cover the three trials backed by the government’s Innovate UK agency – GATEway, the Venturer project in Bristol, and UK Autodrive in Coventry and Milton Keynes. ”We are going through the procurement process and talking to manufacturers,” says Prof Reed. “Suppliers were able to bid for the trials individually or for all three trials as a package. That fits with our model for the project, with Greenwich as a test bed where organisations can bring their technology for development and evaluation with test routes and risk analyses all in place. “As a technology-agnostic project we are welcoming vehicle manufacturers and technology developers during and after the end of the two-year project.” Companies developing driverless shuttles include Phoenix Wings, which has a 35% holding in a French start- up called Induct that developed the Navia driverless shuttle being used in Tampa, Florida and Singapore, as well as Starship, established by the founders of videoconferencing company Skype, and Sidewalk, which is working with delivery company DHL on systems that could handle deliveries in cities, for example from a distribution centre to retail stores. Data collection “The competition launched by Innovate UK is about urban mobility, so the focus has been more on the shuttle and the pod,” Prof Reed says. “Beyond that we are really interested in the data that is collected by automated vehicles and how that can be used in a number of contexts – to understand how to optimise the transport network, to look at incidents that occur, even for asset management. “TRL has devices for assessing road conditions for Highways England, and these are similar to the technologies in the trial. Is there value in having a different approach when, instead of having one super-high quality instrument that’s hugely expensive and used rarely, we can get data from autonomous vehicles as they move about?” TRL is also part of an £11m project to develop fully autonomous cars. This is jointly funded by the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and Jaguar Land Rover, and will look at some key technologies and questions that need to be addressed before driverless cars can be allowed on the roads, says Prof Reed. In addition, TRL is working with the University of Surrey, Warwick University and Imperial College London to understand how distributed control systems and cloud computing can be integrated with vehicles. This project aims to design and validate a new software framework called Secure Cloud- Professor Nick Reed | In conversation Unmanned Systems Technology | Dec 2015/Jan 2016 It’s very interesting to see how the public responds to the vehicles – there’s a lot of curiosity, and we are expecting the same thing at Greenwich One control mechanism for driverless shuttles being tested in the GATEway project in Greenwich is passenger interaction via a touchscreen