A UK project seeks to boost autonomous driving on rural and urban residential roads

7 February 2024

Nissan is playing a major role in a government-funded project to bolster the UK’s burgeoning autonomous driving sector.

Driving environments on rural and urban residential roads present their own unique set of challenges for AD technology. For example, drivers in residential areas often face narrow roads, single lanes with parked vehicles on either side and slow driving speeds. Rural roads can include similar conditions but with higher driving speeds, winding profiles, blind corners, blind gradients and few to no road markings.

Delivered by a consortium of five industry partners including Nissan as technical lead, evolvAD is jointly funded by government and the consortium partners, with some of the money coming from the government’s £100m (US$124m) Intelligent Mobility Fund, administered by the Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV) and delivered by the UK’s innovation agency, Innovate UK.

Urban residential road testing will be done in partnership with TRL, which will use SMLL’s real-world test bed, spread across London roads in Greenwich and the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. For rural environments, where vehicle speeds mean the stakes are even higher, testing will initially be conducted inside proving grounds within the UK, namely UTAC Millbrook and Mira. This testing will include the development and validation of enhanced autonomous vehicle motion control in high dynamic use cases, and will provide lots of useful data to inform further simulation modeling.

The project will also explore and trial vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) technology to improve situation awareness, path planning and overall performance. TRL will connect test vehicles to infrastructure and send new sources of data to the vehicle to improve its situational awareness.

The research project will run for 21 months, coming to an end in March 2025, and will see six members of the NTCE team working with around 20 experts from Connected Places Catapult (CPC), Humanising Autonomy, SBD Automotive and TRL.