Unmanned Systems Technology 007 | UMEX 2016 report | Navya ARMA | Launch & recovery systems | AIE 225CS | AUVs | Electric motors | Lethal autonomous weapons

30 the transmitter with position accuracy within 5 cm. A radio transmitter is also used to provide redundancy to the communications link. The top Lidar sensors are also used to build up a map of the route, although this is uploaded for offline analysis and then the map is downloaded to the vehicle. Vehicle-to-vehicle comms For the trial in Bordeaux, Navya used automotive-grade vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) comms processors and RF transceivers from Israeli firm Autotalks, with software from Swedish company Marben Products communicating with the traffic lights using dedicated short-range controller links based on the IEEE 802.11p standard. This allowed Navya vehicles to get the signal phase broadcast by the traffic lights spread over the route to allow a steady journey and make sure pedestrians were not in the way. Comms between vehicles and intelligent infrastructure allow the vehicles to be informed of upcoming hazards or traffic conditions that are out of sight of their cameras or Lidar sensors. The Marben software supports both the US and European V2V and V2I profiles, and is agnostic about the supporting hardware such as microprocessors, 802.11p-standard comms or the hardware security modules, and can run on operating systems including Linux, QNX, ThreadX or Android. Embedding security and privacy management with application programming interfaces and a predefined set of road safety and traffic optimisation applications has allowed faster integration of the V2V and V2I technology into the ARMA platform. Autotalks has formed a strategic partnership with STMicroelectronics for the V2V and V2I market, to produce a second-generation V2X (vehicle- to-everything) chipset. However, the April/May 2016 | Unmanned Systems Technology Navya as a company is relatively new, but the technology it is using is not. The development of the autonomous vehicle started in 2004 at Induct Technology, with the first system, called Navia, launched in 2011 and demonstrated in the US in January 2014, having been tested in action at the Induct site near Paris. Induct was the only European company invited to participate in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge race for autonomous vehicles in the Mojave Desert. The Navia system saw trials at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, a technical college in Switzerland; at British company Oxis Energy, a pioneer in lithium-sulphur polymer technology; at the Culham Science Centre, a high-security industry park run by the UK Atomic Energy Authority; as the GATEway project demonstrator in Greenwich, London; and at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University. The assets of Induct Technology were acquired in June 2014 by Christophe Sapet, co-founder of Infogrames, France’s first videogames company, and Infonie, the first Internet access provider in France. Along with the Robolution Capital investment fund run by Bruno Bonnell, a e 5m investment in the new company, Navya, has seen the development of the ARMA system, re-using the Lidar and camera technology behind Navia. Company history The GATEway project in London used technology from Navya’s predecessor for its demonstration vehicle Comms between vehicles and the intelligent infrastructure allow the vehicles to be informed of hazards that are out of sight of their cameras