The Oxford RobotCar - Driving Driverless Car Research

Every year, cars get better: they get smarter, cleaner and safer, and autonomy is just another axis in this space. One day (soon), they will drive us - the opposite is much harder to believe. In this talk, the speaker describes some of the work that the Oxford Mobile Robotics Group have been doing in driving this innovation thread. In particular, he describes their approach to infrastructure-free navigation - the family of techniques which let the car understand where it is without relying on GPS or inertial navigation systems. He pllaces the technology within the context of smarter transport, describes the systems engineering which supports it on the Nissan Leaf, and makes explicit linkage to other sectors which stand to benefit from modern robotics science.