TRL is playing a core part in three of the six projects to be delivered within CCAV’s Commercialising CAM Supply Chain Competition (CCAMSC).
The Commercialising CAM programme is funded by the Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles, a joint unit between the Department for Business and Trade (DBT) and the Department for Transport (DfT) and delivered in partnership with Innovate UK and Zenzic. The CCAM Supply Chain competition was launched in October 2022 to support the delivery of early commercialisable Connected and Automated Mobility technologies, products and services and is part of the Government’s vision for self-driving vehicles. Connected and automated mobility 2025: realising the benefits of self-driving vehicles.
The six projects are set to start in autumn 2023. Each project is centred around a trial deployment of early commercial self-driving vehicles, particularly where there are specific technology gaps at present. Each project will improve the safety and security of CAM, improving performance, and reliability necessary for their deployment at scale. Here are details of the three projects TRL are involved in:
evolvAD
This project is being delivered by a consortium led by Nissan and includes Humanising Autonomy, SBD Automotive, the Connected Places Catapult and TRL. It is a follow-on from the hugely successful HumanDrive and ServCity projects. HumanDrive demonstrated human-like autonomy on motorways. ServCity demonstrated complex autonomy on urban arterial roads, notably on the TRL London testbed around Woolwich (the Smart Mobility Living Lab). evolvAD is taking Nissan’s automated driving system out into a broader range of real-world environments such as dense residential estates, and onto rural roads. These new traffic and infrastructure conditions will test many different sub-systems needed for successful self-driving, particularly those relating to mapping, connectivity, and system compute resilience.
TRL’s role in evolvAD is to establish the test methods and the test metrics that are needed to evaluate the performance of automated vehicles for use in these new environments, particularly its key sub-systems such as sensors, the mapping platform etc. Extending the test requirements builds on the test protocols proven so successfully at the SMLL testbed. It builds on work delivered for CAV-PASS, for example, by exploring the best ways to achieve continual in-use monitoring (in anticipation of requirements that are expected to underpin future regulations). This work will include engaging with the wider CAM sector to share these emerging performance specifications and ensure they are supporting future commercialisation.
To deliver the work packages for evolvAD, TRL will be expanding the capabilities of the SMLL testbed. This will include extending the monitored infrastructure of the testbed into new residential streets, and developing greater capacity for pop-up monitoring on rural roads. New test methods and test metrics will then be available for other organisations in the CAM supply chain to support their R&D programmes.
AIM -DBW
The AIM Techologies project is centred around an autonomous bus service concept, and builds on work started by TRL back in 2015 on the GATEWay project, testing the viability of drive by wire solutions. The technology acts as the handshake between the automated driving system and the vehicle platform to make sure that none of the requests made by the automated driving system are unnecessary or unhelpful for the vehicle itself.
The AIM project team are seeking to develop this technology in a manner that is compliant with all the actual and potential standards and specifications. When TRL led the GATEWay project, it was particularly concerned with the operational safety of the automated pod, ie understanding the environment where vehicles get deployed and assessing the risks associated with this. Eight years on and many CAV projects later, providing a safety case for the operation of a CAV is relatively straightforward task. In this project, TRL will support safety requirements by blending functional safety and safety management systems in a unique approach. In order to embed suitable technical requirements into future regulations for CAV, it’s important to understand what all the sub-systems do, what they're capable of doing, how they interact with each other and external data inputs, their resilience etc and set safety goals.
Consumer confidence in CAM depends on assumed accuracy and consistency of both an operational and a functional safety case. So, beyond a safety case explicitly for the AIM Technologies trial, TRL will be working with a range of stakeholders to define and refine functional testing matrix requirements against which performance can be verified. As the final output from this project, TRL will also propose a regulatory framework for validating drive-by-wire technology.
Torque Overlay Automated Steering Technology (TOAST)
The TOAST supply chain project is being led by Titan Motorsports, working with bus manufacturer Alexander Dennis, supported by TRL. Together they are developing an innovative electric steering system for self-driving buses and the connectivity with their automated control systems.
As with the AIM project, TRL’s role is to analyse and define functional safety test criteria as part of evolving our capability in providing safety assurance for these technologies. Electric steering systems have huge potential across a myriad of low volume vehicle types. The outcome for TOAST will be a pathway to approval of low volume, specialist automated vehicles for use on public roads
