28 Dossier | LOXO Alpha & Digital Driver “Getting safety-certified without considering functional safety during the design and engineering phases means you need to make iterative changes on your architecture, which entails changing at least some portion of everything down to base code and retesting everything from scratch,” Amini says. “It’s very, very expensive and timeconsuming; hence our academic research was strictly focused on creating a system that would self-drive very proficiently and so pass – hopefully in one shot – all the requirements of functional safety regulations. That focus is exactly why the LOXO Alpha gained approval to operate on public roads. We accounted fully for functional safety during the engineering phase before going into prototyping.” A big reason why the term ‘functional safety’ comes up so frequently in discussions of automotive certifiability (particularly for autonomous systems) is that ISO standards on functional safety, such as ISO 26262, cover around 3500 requirements and 180 engineering methods for hardware, software, system engineering, production, tooling, management systems and more. “So you see, it’s tough. If we are being realistic, designing your vehicle with one safety engineer next to you actually won’t guarantee certifiability at all, because there’s no practical way one engineer can master 180 engineering methods. That fact made me very grateful to work both pre-LOXO and today with Claudio, whose specialisations complement my own quite nicely,” Amini says. After three years, those involved in the research project were satisfied that the solutions developed through their r&d could bring a significant boost to the road safety of autonomous vehicles. “That opened our eyes to the business opportunities this presented. Theoretically, a vehicle powered by the software we had developed would be proficient in transporting people or goods, able to travel at highway speeds or low inner-city speeds – many different applications,” Amini says. “After some further research on this front, we felt there was an especially large space in Europe for autonomous goods delivery solutions, so we incorporated LOXO with that specific focus in mind, beginning the development of LOXO Alpha around that same time. “But, even before that, we’d already been in discussion with some customers, such as the aforementioned collaboration with Migros, who after understanding our technology gave us the opportunity to do our pilot project with them. “That meant a lot to us, as we became the first company in Switzerland to put a fully uncrewed, self-driving vehicle on Swiss public roads, and it also introduced our prototype vehicle to the public, many of whom really liked the design and gave good feedback on it.” Shape of Alpha The body and subsystems of the LOXO Alpha are mounted on a proprietary chassis supplied by an unnamed Chinese manufacturer. As a low-speed vehicle meant for operating within city limits, aerodynamics have played little to no part in the shaping of the body. Instead, aesthetics were prioritised as a vital step towards public acceptance of the autonomous courier, especially at a time when public concerns and tension regarding self-driving systems are rising. Readers may recall how crowds in San Francisco surrounded and burned down a Waymo-owned autonomous Jaguar I-PACE in February 2024, followed by a flurry of videos being published on social media of Waymo cars making errors on public roads. “Our goal with the outer body was to come up with a design – especially for the first driverless deployment of our technology – that was a bit cute, if I can say that,” Amini muses. April/May 2025 | Uncrewed Systems Technology The core software architectures behind the LOXO Alpha and Digital Driver were developed during an academic research project aimed at giving assurance in autonomous driving
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