Paul Newman built one of the UK's first self-driving cars. Now he's using that hacked Nissan Leaf to create an autonomous driving system that can be applied to any vehicle. The latest of which is a Renault TWIZY. This October, Newman's control system - Selenium - will be let loose in a busy environment for the first time, as part of an £8m Transport for London project in Greenwich.
"It's one of the hardest challenges I have faced," says Newman, professor of information engineering at the University of Oxford. "Building machines that know where they are, what's going on and what they are going to do next."
To tackle this problem, Newman and his team at Oxford's Mobile Robotics Group created the "RobotCar" - a Nissan with three types of sensor and six cameras. For 12 months from November 2014, their car traversed the same route twice a week, dealing with weather, roadworks and pedestrians.
Selenium takes the lessons from the RobotCar and combines them with new software and a greater reliance on computer vision, as well as a cloud-based service that allows vehicles to co-ordinate with others. Created by Newman's 25-person spin-off Oxbotica, which he co-founded with Ingmar Posner, it's designed to drive eight-person pods developed for the project by Westfield Cars and Heathrow Airport.
Oxbotica's software has even been licensed to help a future Mars rover. So when will driverless cars take over? "It's like asking 40 years ago, 'When will computers be widespread?'" says Newman. "There was not a crisp moment between before and after - it just grew."
Update: October 10 – the story has been updated to clarify that the original car adapted with Mr Newman's technology was a Nissan Leaf. He is now using what he learnt from that car to add the software to other vehicles, including a Renault TWIZY pictured.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
