Self-driving car completes UK’s longest autonomous road trip

A self-driving Nissan Leaf has completed a 230-mile journey on UK roads, negotiating complex roundabouts, motorways, and high-speed country lanes with no road markings, white lines or kerbs.

The journey was carried out by a US-based research project, HumanDrive, jointly funded by UK government through the Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV) and Innovate UK, and nine other consortium partners, led by Nissan. The joint funding package for the project totalled £13.5mn.

The Nissan Leaf featured GPS, radar, LIDAR and camera technologies that built up a perception of the world around the vehicle. Using that perceived world, the system made decisions about how to navigate roads and the obstacles encountered on the journey. An engineer was in the car during the trip, ready to take control if required.

A second part of the HumanDrive project looked at how machine-learning artificial intelligence (AI) technologies could enhance the user experience and passenger comfort of connected and autonomous vehicles. Pilot vehicles were tested on private tracks utilising AI systems developed by Hitachi Europe. By building a dataset of previously encountered traffic scenarios and solutions, the ‘learned experience’ can be used to handle similar scenarios in the future and plot a safe route around an obstacle.

UK Future of Transport Minister George Freeman commented: ‘The UK is fast becoming a leader in intelligent and automated vehicle and traffic management technology, a huge global sector set to create thousands of jobs. Our Future of Mobility: Urban Strategy is supporting transport innovation for cleaner, greener and smarter transport, and Nissan’s successful HumanDrive project is an exciting example of how the next phase of the UK’s transport revolution could look.’

Photo: HumanDrive