OmniCAV

"OmniCAV will lay the foundations for the development of a comprehensive, robust and secure simulator, aimed at providing a certification tool for Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) that can be used by regulatory and accreditation bodies, insurers and manufacturers to accelerate the safe development of CAVs.

It brings together a team of eleven internationally renowned organisations, with decades of accumulated knowledge in the area, in order to produce a single-point-of-call simulator to establish when a CAV can safely progress from a testbed to road trial.

To achieve this, OmniCAV will use highly detailed road maps, together with a powerful combination of traffic management, accident and CCTV data, to create a high-fidelity dual (traffic and driving) simulation environment, including AI-trained road users to interact with the AV under test. Scenarios for testing will be developed and randomised in a holistic way to avoid CAVs training to specific conditions, whilst maximising coverage, and the integrity of the testing environment will be taken into consideration through creation of a root-of-trust design to secure the test inputs, simulator configuration and resulting test outputs.

Critically, the simulator will offer market-leading coverage of a representative element of the UK road network, through encompassing rural roads, peri-urban and urban roads, to help enable autonomy for all.

Representatives of the key end-users, including a local authority, an OEM and an insurance provider, will be engaged throughout to understand their needs.

The validity of the synthetic test environment compared to the real-world is of particular importance, and OmniCAV will be tested and refined through an iterative approach involving real-world comparisons and working in conjunction with a CAV test-bed.

This is an ambitious project aiming to step-change the safe trialing of CAVs in a safe, holistic and challenging manner in order to accelerate their training, deployment and adoption."