Professor Tony Pipe, Deputy Director at Bristol Robotics Laboratory, UWE will get the morning session of the UKIVA Machine Vision Conference and Exhibition underway with a Keynote presentation about the Venturer driverless cars project. The Venturer Consortium, led by SNC-Lavalin’s Atkins, consists of ten public, private and academic experts, including BAE Systems, Williams and Bristol Robotics Laboratory.

This wide-reaching project assesses the responses of passengers and other road users to driverless cars as well as looking at the enabling technology and developing an understanding of the insurance and legal implications of increased vehicle autonomy. These are all crucial factors that will influence wide scale adoption of CAV capability.

Two practical trials using the consortium’s autonomous vehicle, BAE Systems Wildcat, have already been completed. The first was carried out in the Williams Advanced Engineering simulator and the second on roads under carefully controlled conditions. The Wildcat is equipped with a situational awareness system utilising complementary sensor technologies including radar and cameras.

The Conference and Exhibition will be held at Arena MK, Milton Keynes, UK on Wednesday 16th May 2018 (www.machinevisionconference.co.uk). UKIVA Chairman, Paul Wilson, commented: “We are delighted that Professor Pipe has agreed to give this keynote speech and we now have two keynotes that are looking at very different types of autonomous vehicles. While the Venturer project is concerned with passenger vehicles, our other keynote speech from Henry Harris-Burland, VP Marketing at Starship Technologies covers the development of advanced, self-driving personal delivery robots that can deliver food or shopping within a 2-mile (3km) radius in an urban environment.