Over the past three years the project has been working to understand how to help cities successfully incorporate autonomous vehicle technologies into a complex urban environment to deliver a “Robotaxi” style service, with the aim being to create a blueprint of the type of infrastructure that will be required to support such technologies.
ServCity is jointly funded by government and industry, the government’s £100m Intelligent Mobility fund administered by the Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV) and delivered by the UK’s innovation agency, Innovate UK. Six partners – Nissan, Connected Places Catapult, TRL, Hitachi Europe, the University of Nottingham and SBD Automotive – have been collaborating to develop a blueprint that will guide OEMs, transport providers and city planners to get ‘CAV-ready’ in the UK’s cities.
Built upon an electric Nissan LEAF, the ServCity CAV has successfully completed increasingly challenging validation trials in the real-world environment of TRL’s urban testbed, the Smart Mobility Living Lab (SMLL), based in Greenwich. ServCity was able to leverage the full capabilities of the SMLL which used its network of roadside sensors and 5G enabled data processing suite to create a futuristic cooperative infrastructure environment, sending new sources of data to the CAV to improve its situational awareness (e.g. alerting the CAV to the intention of an unseen bus to stop ahead).
At the heart of ServCity is the aim to show that autonomous technology can provide a truly people-centric mobility service, and which adjustments to the road’s infrastructure are most desirable to make that service the best user experience possible.
This project, as with all the previous CAV development projects backed by Government funding, is an important means of giving people the confidence that CAVs are safe to introduce onto UK roads. To that end, the finale of the project is a series of demonstrations to stakeholders where guests have been able to experience what an initial deployment of the CAV and CAV-ready infrastructure technologies might be like.
David Moss, Senior Vice President, Region Research & Development for Nissan AMIEO said, “Our 100% electric Nissan LEAF has proven to be the ideal test vehicle. Through our Nissan Ambition 2030 long-term vision, we are committed to supporting greater access to safe and exciting mobility. Advancing our autonomous drive capability and expertise is critical to this effort and research projects such as ServCity are vital to the evolution of technology.
“Through our world-class R&D base in Cranfield in the UK, Nissan is continuously innovating to bring cutting-edge, purpose-driven technologies that benefit our customers. ServCity’s achievements contribute to our efforts to usher in a future where we hope to see zero fatalities on the road while providing customers with the added comfort and convenience that come from advanced autonomous drive technologies.”
Commenting Transport Minister Jesse Norman, added, “The Government has invested £7million in this project to be at the forefront of innovation. Since then ServCity has proven key to answer the practical questions of how to integrate self-driving vehicles into cities for the public good.”
Marcel Pooke, Sustainability and GIS Team Lead at Connected Places Catapult said, “Throughout the project Connected Places Catapult has been demonstrating the art of the possible in scaling CAV technologies, and their supporting infrastructure, to help get these vehicles delivering vital services as soon as possible. Based on the potential demand for a CAV service, combined with potential areas of operation, the Catapult has helped create a blueprint that provides a basis for follow-on work by many other organisations and aims to assist and enable the full-scale deployment of an operational Robotaxi service in a UK city.”
Robotaxis are seen as having the potential to fundamentally transform mobility for both consumers and the cities they operate in.
"The user experience lies at the heart of that transformation, as operators will need to carefully balance customer expectations with real-world technological constraints imposed by both vehicles and city infrastructure. The ServCity project has seen theory put into practice, so we are now confident of being able to help car makers design a seamless Robotaxi experience,” concluded Andrew Hart CEO at SBD Automotive.
