Enabling a Novel Evaluation Continuum for Connected & Autonomous Vehicles

Moving people and goods is worth over £100 billion to the UK economy (across transport modes), but it comes at a cost, with over 2000 deaths and 120,000 injuries every year. Connected and autonomous transport has the potential to make land, air, and marine journeys safer, faster, and more efficient, contributing to both our national health and carbon emissions goals. Additionally, the connected and autonomous transport systems' market globally is projected to be over £700 billion by 2030, so this sector could be a major driver of economic growth in the UK. The biggest challenge to delivering the potential of autonomous transport systems are provable quantified safety and consumer understanding. Without addressing these issues across all sectors, it will take us significantly longer to unlock the potential commercial and wider benefits.

Over the last three years of the Future Leaders Fellowship (FLF), to find answers to various research questions in Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) (i.e., land), the fellow has often looked to other transport domains like aviation and marine and benefitted by transferring learnings from them to CAV. This experience brought a realisation that "while aviation and marine are also introducing the autonomous system, the safety challenges are similar to CAVs". This realisation underpins the fellow's +3 FLF renewal vision.

The vision for +3 Renewal of the UKRI FLF application is to translate the learnings on safety assurance of CAV to aviation and marine autonomous systems (aerial drones and unmanned vessels). While there are obvious differences between the transport domains (land, air and marine), the approach to safety assurance could potentially be similar if a first principles approach is taken.
Safety assurance of autonomous transport systems in air and marine requires three key areas of research, standards, and regulation: 1) test scenarios; 2) test environment; and 3) safety argument. However, the...