The Department for Transport and the Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles are working with Innovate UK to find and fund three automated vehicle projects. A total of £1.5 million will be available for the continued development of technologies and assurance processes to enable the safe use of fully automated vehicles.

Scope

Your project can focus on one or more of the following themes:

  • Automated driving system (ADS) development, to reduce safety driver intervention requirements
  • Sensing and perception system development to reduce safety driver intervention requirements
  • Remote monitoring or remote operation
  • Scenario development or scenario application for intended deployment area
  • Strategies for coping with scenarios that exceed operational design domain
  • Automated incident detection (including “near misses”), automated monitoring, and associated data handling

However, this is not an exhaustive list, and Innovate UK will consider other areas of focus. Where this applies, you should also read the list of projects that Innovate UK will not fund.

Eligibility

Firstly, all projects should have total eligible costs between £25,000 and £1 million. Work should begin by 1st October 2021 and end by 31st March 2022, lasting between 3 and 6 months.

Secondly, the lead organisation must:

  • Be a UK registered business of any size, a research organisation or a research and technology organisation (RTO)
  • Be an autonomous driving systems (ADS) developer
  • Have an existing automated driving system that has been tested and demonstrated on the UK public roads under the UK Code of Practice: Automated vehicle trialling (Feb 2019)
  • Collaborate with other UK registered businesses, research organisations, public sector organisations or charities
  • Collaborate with a potential autonomous vehicle service provider, or fleet customer who will operate the automated vehicles for example a local authority
  • Carry out its project work in the UK and intend to exploit the results from or in the UK

This competition is open from Monday 28th June until Wednesday 28th July. For more information and to apply, visit the competition page. Alternatively, please contact us if you’d like to discuss your application with one of our advisers.

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