By ATN
- The deal will allow Oxbotica to bring its vision for
autonomous driving to life, by helping it deploy and scale its autonomous software platform - Using Google Cloud, Oxbotica will accelerate its
ability to analyse and model vast amounts of data from multiple
scenarios in its AI-powered metaverse - The collaboration can also boost the real-world
impact of vehicle autonomy, with potential use-cases such as autonomous
public transportation to reduce congestion in city centres
Oxbotica, the British-based autonomous vehicle software developer,
today announced a new strategic collaboration with Google Cloud that
will help accelerate the deployment of its autonomous software platform
to customers around the world.
The partnership will combine Google Cloud’s expertise in cloud
infrastructure with Oxbotica’s market-leading autonomous
software platform to create scalable, safe, and reliable autonomous driving
solutions for any business with transportation in its value chain. These
businesses include last-mile logistics, agriculture, light industry,
and public transport.
Oxbotica plans to use Google Cloud products—compute, storage,
networking, and leading data and analytics products like Vertex AI—to
help develop, test, validate, and verify its self-driving technology. It
will also leverage Google Cloud’s proven cyber-security technologies to
help ensure secure use of autonomous mobility technology.
Alongside the core development of its self-driving platform, Oxbotica
will use Google Cloud to generate digital twins in Oxbotica’s
MetaDriver, an AI-powered metaverse that connects and controls virtual
and physical fleets together, sending real-time analytics on
performance.
Oxbotica’s autonomous software platform, MetaDriver, automatically generates a vast bank of virtual
scenarios to help ensure the safety of autonomous vehicles. Google Cloud
will provide the data and machine learning tools to enable MetaDriver
to apply Oxbotica’s proprietary generative AI tools to the extensive
bank of virtual scenarios including unusual edge cases that are often
economically, environmentally or physically impractical to discover in
conventional testing. For instance, a user can create a full, 24-hour,
day-and-night cycle of sensor data, along with seasonal and extreme
weather conditions, from one single data capture run.
By tapping into the scalability of the cloud, Oxbotica will be able
to rapidly analyse and process these large datasets to learn across
different use cases. This will speed up time-to-insights and allow for
more testing and experimentation, which in turn will help improve the
safety of the technology.
“We are thrilled to partner with Google Cloud to accelerate bringing
autonomous driving solutions to market globally. Google Cloud is a
global leader in cloud infrastructure and using its cutting-edge
technology and AI powered tools will strengthen our proposition for our
customers,” said Gavin Jackson, CEO of Oxbotica.
Oxbotica targets industrial use cases, where there is an urgent need
to make the transition to autonomy today. Real-world applications of
Oxbotica’s autonomous software platform include passenger shuttles operating 24/7 on fixed
routes in cities, where there is a driver shortage but increasing
demand for services. For instance, in the UK, almost 1 in 10 bus driver
positions are vacant, leading to shrinking bus networks across the
country.
With Google Cloud, Oxbotica’s customers will be able to easily and
quickly scale from single prototype vehicles to full fleets. In
addition, the collaboration will enable Oxbotica to explore the larger
impact of autonomous vehicles on congestion, public transit, and more.
Oxbotica intends to use Google Cloud infrastructure to make available
application programming interfaces (APIs) for autonomous driving, which
will enable its customers to create new lines of business (such as
applications and other products), as well as more easily manage their
existing data and services.
“The combination of Oxbotica’s leading technology and our reliable
infrastructure and AI and data-enabled cloud platform has the potential
to accelerate autonomous mobility in a variety of industrial use
cases,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud. “From last mile
logistics to public transportation, we look forward to working together
to positively impact the lives of end users.”
For more autonomous vehicle technology news, click here.
