Parking Cars Together
Collaboration is more than just a convenience for the CAV industry, it’s survival
While most Connected & Autonomous Vehicle (CAV) technology businesses are busy developing ground-breaking tech, it is not unheard of to run into problems. Resolutions are often best solved by throwing some specialist engineers together in a room and an hour later, what might have seemed intractable often proves to be resolvable.
Collaboration is certainly not a novel idea but transferring practices which enable individual organisations to succeed up to an industrial level is often more challenging, but this collaborative approach is increasingly becoming an essential aspect of cracking the CAV nut. Why? Because the challenge is large and multifaceted and impossible for one organisation to solve on its own. It makes sense for organisations to specialise in their areas of expertise and to harness the power of collaboration to solve the bigger problem — and that’s just what Parkopedia are doing.
With over 7 million parking slots registered on its platforms, the value of an autonomous valet parking solution for Parkopedia’s global parking curation business is self-evident — in fact, over 65% of drivers highlighted the time lost to searching for a parking spot as the most useful contribution autonomous systems could make to their driving experience — and an automated parking solution would remove the backwash of road congestion by up to 30%. To tackle this problem, the company led a consortium of different capabilities to stunning effect.
What is truly distinctive about this achievement is perhaps not the technology itself but rather the collaboration that has brought the solution to life in a relatively short timescale. And while this thirty-month project lifecycle still has time to run, its five objectives have largely been met.
The consortium was brought together for the project under the banner of Autonomous Valet Parking, or AVP.
The complexion of the AVP contributors is a surefire exemplar of best practice. As the academic partner, The University of Surrey researched the mapping and localisation requirements for the navigation software, public bodies such as UK R&I underpinned the project with around £1.2m of funding, Admiral Insurance assessed the liabilities associated with operating such an autonomous system and StreetDrone provided the autonomous-ready vehicle in order that the trials could progress from a standing start without the need for extensive vehicle platform development.
Other contributors such as the Transport Systems Catapult were responsible for the safety work package, Systems Engineers at the Connected Places Catapult aided the development of verification and validation processes and Ordnance Survey contributed to mapping. It feels like an Oscar speech, but there are doubtless many other agencies and companies beyond the immediate AVP consortium that have provided specialist sectorial capability or insight that might have been overlooked, but the list of contributors is certainly large.
Time for a Mode Change?
What do we learn from this? In contrast to some of the more monolithic endeavours to deliver CAV solutions from some of the big operators in the industry, collaboration seems not only the preferential mode of operation but increasingly seems like the only way ahead. And while commercial realities will of course eventually drive organisations towards ownership and monetisation of IP, wholesale appropriation of rights is also not a sustainable model
The future of CAV will demand a complex and delicately balanced ecosystem of IP, with a significant element of this capability existing in an open-source context to catalyse collaboration. This capability will be sufficient for partners to test and validate new solutions quickly, with the eventual monetisation and licensing of core IP becoming more widespread as solutions reach the point of scaling and commercial viability.
If only to underscore this point, AVP’s project achievements are there on the AVP project website for all to see. The future of autonomous vehicles lies in building shared understanding and referring to the models and approaches that advanced the open-source software industry so rapidly in the 1990s. And remember, if you hit a problem — put some smart people in a room together.
