27 The Alpha has henceforth served as a crucial demonstrator platform, not only in service and operation trials in key partnerships such as that between LOXO and Migros – the largest retail company, supermarket chain and employer in Switzerland – but also as a safer, more acceptable self-driving technology. Functional safety Prior to the founding of LOXO in 2021, Amini and one of his fellow co-founders, CTO Claudio Panizza, had gained extensive experience as specialists in systems engineering and functional safety for the automotive industry. Both had worked at safety research centre ROSAS (Robust and Safe Systems), and Amini also co-founded CertX, which is now one of the world’s few accredited certification bodies for functional safety in cybersecurity, autonomous systems and AI robustness. During that time, they were tasked with evaluating a number of autonomous solutions entering Switzerland from France, China and elsewhere, alongside many innovations from closely related areas of automotive technological development. Of particular note was how startups were struggling to achieve compliance with safety certification requirements; solutions arriving at Amini and Panizza’s doors were often three to four years of intensive re-engineering away from becoming anything certifiable. “If you build an automotive system, and you don’t have a functional safety expert standing next to you taking part in the system design and engineering, you can easily wind up making something that ostensibly works great only to discover at the certification phase that it doesn’t work from a safety perspective at all,” Amini explains. “After experiencing exactly that several times in evaluating these sorts of projects, we came to the conclusion that self-driving systems were quite far from having the performance required for us to be able to give the safety assurances needed for them to operate safely on Swiss roads.” Shortly thereafter, starting in 2018, the pair became involved in an academic research project, aimed at determining how safety could be assured in autonomous driving systems through extensive self-driving performance tests, analytics and software engineering. Uncrewed Systems Technology | April/May 2025 The LOXO Alpha is engineered for efficient logistics, pleasing aesthetics and, most of all, precise compliance with functional safety standards and SAE Level 4 autonomy (All images courtesy of LOXO) LOXO Alpha & Digital Driver | Dossier
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