Trusted Intelligent Connected Autonomous Vehicles (TIC-IT)

Funder

Innovate UK
Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles

Value to Coventry University

£4.78m

Project team

Dr Huw Davies, Dr Christophe Bastien, Kevin Vincent, Dr Karthik Ekambaram, Andrew Parkes

Collaborators

The Trusted Intelligent Connected Autonomous Vehicle (CAV) consortium – known as TIC-IT – is led by HORIBA MIRA in partnership with Coventry University and is part of the national strategy to establish the UK as a global-leading centre of excellence for the development, testing and commercialisation of CAVs.

Partners

HORIBA MIRA

Duration of project

01/01/2018 - 31/12/2020

Project overview

Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAV) are expected to bring huge benefits to society, representing a substantial wealth creation opportunity. To turn this opportunity into reality, the UK must build an ecosystem to accelerate the development, deployment and commercialisation. The Trusted Intelligent CAV (TIC-IT) facility will be critical to this ecosystem, providing a realistic, controlled high speed, limit-handling and fully connected environment.

Allowing real world CAV driving scenarios to be created, including testing that cannot be conducted in public environments, TIC-IT will be a flexible facility allowing the maximum number of use cases and test scenarios to be performed using temporary real world features. It will accelerate development and testing to ensure CAVs are safe and secure. Developed in conjunction with Coventry University’s Research Institute for Future Transport and Cities, CAV (TIC-IT) will bring a unique capability to the UK by increasing the level of test and engineering activities conducted allowing the consortium to build its capability in CAV as well as enhancing the attractiveness of the UK to inward investment.

One of the major issues facing road transportation globally is ever increasing urbanisation and the resultant congestion, a major contributor to this congestion is parking efficiency. CAV and the associated technologies and the move towards Mobility as a Service present a major opportunity to solve this parking challenge.

Project objectives

Creation of a world class Connected and Autonomous Vehicle (CAV) testing facility, which is purpose built, realistic and safe environment for testing CAVs up to the limit of their operability. This project is a critical activity to ensure consumer confidence in new technologies, by enabling a wide range of CAV driving scenarios to be tested. The Centre for Connected Autonomous Automovite Research (CCAAR) is developing methodologies to discover edge case safety scenarios for future vehicles while developing the digital twin of the facility.

• Impact statement

  Coventry University’s role was to lead on the development of the virtual test environment – the digital twin of the facility – and to develop a set of use cases and test scenarios for highly automated driving – specifically to identify corner test cases which are particularly challenging for the development of CAV. For the former, evaluation, discussion and debate about existing software was vital to understanding opportunities and challenges. This informed our approach for the creation of a digital twin that has found a wide acceptance with the stakeholder community. For the test case development, our collaboration with the international community as part of the UN’s ITU has informed UK activity and maximised its impact on an international stage. This has led to strengthened international engagement in future planned research.

• Outputs

  Internal Project Reports (for funder)

  • State of the art with respect to corner cases
  • Data analysis to support corner case extraction
  • Development of a protocol for corner case identification
  • International stakeholder engagement exercise
  • Summary Report – protocol development

  UN ITU AI4AD Collaboration between FG-AI4AD and UK project TIC-IT

  • FG-AI4AD-TRR-I-016-R1 (stakeholder engagement summary for technical review report)
  • FG-AI4AD-I-038 (stakeholder engagement request)