JLR Partners with British Researchers on Autonomous Vehicle Technology

Jaguar Land Rover Ltd. and the U.K.'s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) are jointly funding an 11-million ($17-million) research program to develop autonomous vehicle technologies. The research will take place at 10 U.K. universities and the country's Transport Research Laboratory in Wokingham.

The partners have selected five initial projects from a call for research papers. One program will study the use of advanced radar and video sensing to more accurately identify other road users and the surrounding infrastructure, including precisely mapping terrain and potential road hazards such as potholes and variances in surface textures.

A second initiative will adapt new technologies to the needs of users based on how different drivers interact with autonomous systems. Researchers will evaluate the behavior of drivers of various ages, sizes, experience and capabilities in driving simulators and on test tracks.

Another group will focus on improving the transition between human control and automated systems. The team, including engineers, neuroscientists and human factors researchers, will conduct a detailed study of driver attention and cognitive control characteristics when interacting with vehicle systems.

A separate group aims to integrate distributed control systems and cloud computing with autonomous and connected vehicle technologies. The project will utilize wireless technologies and cloud computing that allows sharing expensive computing resources, while providing access to a large amount of data. The goal is to design and validate a viable framework.

The final program will look at how to best use shared data among vehicles, drivers and the infrastructure to optimize safety, traffic flow and the overall driving experience. This will include developing software algorithms, applying experimental methods from behavioral sciences and processing information from connected cars to develop intelligent driver systems based on driver behaviors and other data.