30 “Very intentionally, the vehicle seems to have a face, one that looks friendly, and its shape and size are unimposing. We surveyed those interacting with the vehicle, and concluded that 96% of people find it pleasant, convenient and easy to interact with,” he says. “Lastly, something else I’ve never liked about the majority of autonomous road vehicles is that their sensor deployments are often incredibly ugly. Their Lidars and cameras are bolted on, but not truly integrated into the body, so they look quite alien to the uninitiated, so we focused very much on integrating our sensors inside the body, such that most of them are barely visible unless you stand very close to it.” The LOXO Alpha measures 3.5 m long, 2 m tall and just under 2 m in width, with an empty weight of 800 kg and a carrying capacity of 350 kg. Multiple concepts for the size and volume of the vehicle were drawn up in the design phase, with the eventual dimensions of the Alpha selected to cover the average distances, cargo quantities, and trips per day common to European last-mile deliveries, with LOXO’s prospective customers providing extensive input on that market research. Similarly, the battery was sized to enable the typical ranges of last-mile deliveries, with up to a 100 km range between charges from the uncrewed vehicle. Within its weight category, the Alpha can drive at up to 45 kph. Throughout the pilot project with Migros, a 30 kph speed limit was observed for safety reasons. Identifying and prioritising these various configuration and performance requirements occupied the first three to four months of r&d in 2021, alongside significant software development (given that LOXO is principally a software company and not a hardware provider). “Because of this focus on software, the Alpha’s body and compartments have been built on a pre-existing chassis platform, which meant we didn’t have to develop and engineer a whole platform ourselves, and we already knew which suppliers were the right ones because we’d already looked into it and trialled some components during the research project,” Amini recounts. A few months of integration took place after the evaluation of requirements as components arrived in-house and were assembled together. These included the body panels made from a fibreglass epoxy composite, chosen as a less expensive and complex alternative to carbon. Fibreglass is also used for its reasonable mechanical stability, as well as its aesthetics (Amini notes such qualities are why fibreglass is increasingly used in the automotive industries). Additionally, the lack of access to overseas material suppliers during the COVID years limited the availability of cost-effective carbon composite during prototyping. The body and electronics move around on a powertrain featuring four in-wheel hub motors, with this configuration enabling redundancy in propulsion, as well as in braking and front and rear steering. Each motor’s design comes with in-built suspension, through which it integrates with the chassis. The battery is charged over six hours via an AC connection, this having been a key market requirement. European customers and operators of last-mile delivery services expressed to LOXO a dislike for the high battery replacement costs associated with fast charging (and such services only operate in the daytime, so slow charging during the low-tariff nighttime hours is strongly preferred). Integrating sensors, computers and software took the lion’s share of work, followed by roughly six months of testing and another six months of work to achieve road authorisations (making about 18 months of r&d to get the prototype Alpha ready for operation). Sensor complement The bill of sensors has been painstakingly crafted and laid out around the vehicle to satisfy functional safety requirements from the beginning (rather than making the error of leaving functional safety as something to be achieved later on), with Amini estimating that LOXO must have had discussions with every possible supplier of the sensor technologies used on the Alpha. “As a key part of that we went straight for solid-state Lidars instead of conventional Lidars, which spin their lasers 360° using a rotating mirror,” Amini says. “The principal issue with the mechanical design of those latter, standard Lidars is that, in an automotive context, road vehicles can frequently suffer a lot of shaking and vibration.” Such conditions, in LOXO’s experience, can throw off point measurements far enough that spinning mirror Lidars may not consistently achieve automotive functional April/May 2025 | Uncrewed Systems Technology The LOXO Alpha is a 2 m-tall vehicle built largely from fibreglass composite. It is engineered to carry up to 350 kg and achieve a 45 kph maximum speed on its electric powertrain
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