VENTURER: Introducing driverless cars to UK roads
Project details
Full project title: VENTURER: Introducing driverless cars to UK roads
Sponsor: Innovate UK
Principal Investigators for Social Research Work Package: Professor Graham Parkhurst, Professor John Parkin, Dr Chris Alford, Dr Phil Morgan
Overall UWE Bristol Principal Investigator: Professor Tony Pipe
Centre for Transport and Society (CTS) Researchers: Ben Clark, Billy Clayton, Miriam Ricci, Ian Shergold
Start Date: July 2015
End Date: June 2018
Project summary
In July 2014, the Department for Transport and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills announced that they would be investing £10m in ‘research and development projects to research how driverless cars can be integrated into everyday life’. Three projects were awarded, enabling trials of different types of driverless vehicles within the public realm in Milton Keynes, Coventry, Greenwich and Bristol.
The Centre for Transport and Society (CTS) are partners in the Bristol-focused trial which involves configuring and testing the BAE Systems’ Wildcat autonomous vehicle. The project will also trial a pod-type vehicle for use in a pedestrian environment and will instrument a public bus, the latter for data-collection purposes only.
The project is funded by Innovate UK and brings together a consortium led by Atkins, and including AXA UK, BAE Systems, Bristol City Council, South Gloucestershire Council, First Bus, Fusion Processing, Williams Advanced Engineering, Burges Salmon, University of Bristol and UWE Bristol. UWE Bristol is involved both through CTS and through the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, which is collaborative with the University of Bristol.
The study started in July 2015 and will run for three years.