(Kitco News) - As firms like Alphabet, Tesla, and GM compete to build self-driving vehicles, they face competition from a U.K.-based company that claims to have developed autonomous technology, without the need for GPS, satellite navigation, or other external inputs.
Professor Paul Newman, a University of Oxford professor, founded Oxbotica in 2014; the company has tested several self-driving cars in both off-road terrains and public roads.
If a car has a computer that can access the vehicle's brakes, steering, and other controls, then Oxbotica's software can potentially turn the car autonomous.
"All transportation can be transformed as a result of autonomy from Oxbotica," said Gavin Jackson, CEO of the company. "Anything that has a computer, that can give us access to the vehicle's controls, is transformable in the form of autonomy."
Jackson spoke with David Lin, Anchor and Producer at Kitco News, at the Collision conference in Toronto.
Oxbotica Driver
Oxbotica's full stack autonomy system, the Oxbotica Driver, allows clients to customize what they want in their autonomous vehicles.
"It doesn't matter to us whether your vehicle is a 600-ton mining truck, a tractor, a construction vehicle, a small electric pod in a solar farm, a shared transportation vehicle in an urban city, a last-minute delivery vehicle, or a truck in the road," said Jackson. "The Oxbotica Driver is able to drive all of those."
There are five levels of autonomy, with Level 5 being the highest. He said that Oxbotica is "Level 4 plus," which is where autonomy is "commercially viable." Level 4 involves pre-mapped routes and does not allow the driver to change a route midway.
Oxbotica's software means "you can have autonomous delivery pods that deliver groceries to your home, or 40-ton trucks hurtling down the freeway delivering hub-to-hub goods to different parts of the world. Or it could mean a mining truck or a construction truck."'
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Safety and security
In 2018, an autonomous Uber vehicle struck and killed a cyclist on an Arizona freeway. This incident heightened calls for more safety testing in self-driving cars.
Jackson said that when it comes to safety testing, "you're looking for extraordinary things. When you drive around, and you see something you've never seen before… you have to understand how to deal with that obscure edge case for self-driving."
Typically, this is done through companies physically driving their vehicles and gathering data. However, companies do not have to deal with many extreme situations in such tests, and are risk-averse in their testing.
Jackson said that Oxbotica's solution is to run its software through countless virtual simulations, which subject the Oxbotica Driver to "adversarial AI."
"If we can test all those edge cases, we can drive many millions of miles in the metaverse, smooth out those edge cases that you have to assuredly say you can deal with, and then release the software," he said.
To find out about Oxbotica's applications to mining, and its partnership with Wenco, watch the above video.
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