Jaguar Land Rover is developing autonomous cars capable of all-terrain, off-road driving in any weather condition – dirt, rain, ice, snow or fog – under a project badged Cortex.
As part of Cortex, the company will engineer a ‘5D’ technique combining acoustic, video, radar, and light detection and distance sensing (lidar) data live in real time.
Access to this combined data improves the awareness of the environment the car is in. Machine-learning enables the self-driving car to behave in an increasingly sophisticated way, so it can handle any weather condition on any terrain.
Chris Holmes, connected and autonomous vehicle research manager at Jaguar Land Rover, said, “It’s important that we develop our self-driving vehicles with the same capability and performance customers expect from all Jaguars and Land Rovers.
“Self-driving is an inevitability for the automotive industry and ensuring that our autonomous offering is the most enjoyable, capable and safe is what drives us to explore the boundaries of innovation.
“Cortex gives us the opportunity to work with some fantastic partners whose expertise will help us realize this vision in the near future.”
The technology will be based on new algorithms, sensor optimization and will involve physical testing on off-road tracks in the UK. The University of Birmingham is working on the project alongside JLR, which is part of Innovate UK’s third round of Connected and Autonomous Vehicle Funding announced in March 2018.
