British AI start-up Academy of Robotics has developed Europe’s first roadworthy autonomous delivery vehicle, which is focused on tackling the last mile delivery challenge.
The sleek, electric powered Kar-Go machine was unveiled at CAV Scotland this week, and is already involved in a partnership with infrastructure giant Eurovia to support highways maintenance.
The Kar-go machine
The two companies announced plans for a national scheme to trial the use of Kar-go's autonomous vehicle technology to support urban and rural road management and to accelarte the 'training' of Kar-go's navigation system on unmarked roads.
Eurovia will be using the driverless machine for the delivery of small plant equipment, tools, materials and other components to and from the highway work site as well as the potential use of road condition data collected by Kar-go as it travels.
In return Kar-go will be supported by accessing digital camera data gathered by Eurovia's fleet in the UK, which covers over 50,000km of UK roads.
William Sachiti, CEO and co-founder of Academy of Robotics, commented: 'To date, most autonomous vehicle training and testing has taken place on well-marked roads or specially designated test centres, but these areas rarely reflect real-world conditions.
'We believe that training our vehicles to operate on the widest range of real-world conditions is critical to preparing them for the unpredictable elements vehicles may face in the ‘real world’. The AI can process the data at immense speeds, so one of the biggest challenges holding back this technology is the ability to get hold of enough data on diverse conditions to train vehicles at scale.'
Scott Wardrop, chief executive of Eurovia UK commented: 'We were impressed by the sophistication of the technology developed by Academy of Robotics and the professionalism of such a small startup team. We have reviewed a number of autonomous vehicle solutions, but a critical component for us in developing this partnership was the technology’s ability to manage the complexity of recognising different road surfaces and their absolute commitment to sustainable innovation – investing in the future.As a Sussex-based company, we are also proud to support a local start-up that has built the first Kar-go in Henfield.'
The trial will initially focus on the UK but could potentially be rolled-out to the 15 countries Eurovia operates in Europe and North America.
Kar-go
Understanding hazards and delivering
Kar-go features advanced A.I. navigational capabilities including a machine-vision system and a patented internal package-sorting mechanism to shuffle parcels into the correct order for drop-off.
It delivers to a person’s real-time location - like meeting a pre-booked taxi.
Academy of Robotics technology boasts a 'unique approach to colour perception' which addresses the challenge of environmental variability caused by shadows and bright reflections.
This means that Kar-go's operating system an understanding the difference between cracks, puddles, potholes and shadows.
Advanced Automation
• Kar-go’s modular driverless delivery technology combines Continuous-Time Recurrent Neural Networks (CTRNNs) with CNNs (Convolutional neural networks) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), to create a highly evolved top-level controller system which can ‘learn’ from the past, ‘perceive’ its environment and make any necessary corrections. Moreover, the team can run this complex hierarchical system on a single NVIDIA GPU-equipped desktop.
• Kar-go’s unique combination of its Navigational Freespace and PilotNet decision-making software means the vehicle can navigate safely in complex situations such as roundabouts and junctions even without GPS.
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