The Connected Places Catapult – the new name for the Transport Systems and Future Cities Catapults.
The new Connected Places Catapult (CPC) will accelerate smarter living and travelling in and between the places of tomorrow. We will focus on growing businesses with innovations in mobility services and the built environment that enable new levels of physical, digital and social connectedness. CPC will operate at the intersection between public and private sectors and between local government and transport authorities. We will convene the disparate parts of the market to help innovators navigate the complexity of doing business, creating new commercial opportunities and improving productivity, socio-economic and environmental benefits for places.
In addition to being project manager and dissemination lead for HumanDrive, we will also be responsible for safety case elements as well as supporting the live trial elements of the project. This combination of a complex ‘live-traffic’ scenario and AI-controlled vehicle is ground-breaking, as such presents considerable technical and safety challenges. These challenges will be met by a series of trials conducted on specialised test tracks, in simulation and open public roads to develop the AI-controlled vehicle.
CPC experts will assess and identify the myriad of hazards involved, building on the learnings from the hugely successful LUTZ Pathfinder Project. CPC Human Factors scientists are also assisting in the design of trials to gather data and determine the human driving behaviour upon which much of the AV natural human driving style will be based.
The knowledge acquired will be used to advise on future CAV projects and technologies, in line with CPC priorities to support UK business, increase collaboration between industry and academia, and ultimately increase economic activity in the Intelligent Mobility (IM) sector.
For more information visit https://cp.catapult.org.uk/
Safety Management with the HumanDrive Project
By Richard Hillman, Senior Technologist at the Transport Systems Catapult (TSC)
I delivered a presentation about how the TSC are managing the safety of the HumanDrive project to the Innovate UK CAV Cohort event at Oxford University (July 2018). The event provided a hub for all the organisations involved in Innovate UK funded projects to share lessons learned, latest ideas and upcoming opportunities, in order to ensure that the efforts that consortium partners have made are exploited to provide maximum benefit.
The safety of AVs is an emerging area with no standardised methods established, and as the TSC has developed some novel ways to approach the safety of the HumanDrive project, it was good to be able to share our work with an audience who are in a position to make use of it! I was pleased with how receptive to our ideas people were – many projects are looking to solve similar problems and are unsure how to proceed. All in all, it was a very productive day, and it was good to be able to share the work we’ve done at TSC and within the HumanDrive consortium. Download the presentation here.
BBC’s Law in Action on legal implications of CAVs
Neil Fulton, interim Chief Operating Officer from the TSC, was interviewed by the BBC’s Law in Action (April 2018) about the HumanDrive project and the wider legal implications of CAVs on UK roads. Listen to the podcast here.
