The CAPRI (Connected & Autonomous POD on-Road Implementation) project is a collaboration between twenty businesses and universities, aiming to produce a commercially viable autonomous vehicle. The "POD"s are a new class of vehicle, transporting passengers through complex environments for "last mile" journeys. More than just producing technology, CAPRI will establish legal and insurance frameworks for PODs, as well as demonstrating a track record of safety to establish trust with end users.

The Trustworthy Systems Laboratory will be working with TVS, the University of Warwick and the Bristol Robotics Laboratory to create a validation methodology for autonomous vehicles, as a form of "Digital MOT". Advanced testing equipment from BRL and tooling from TVS will be combined with novel test and verification techniques to thoroughly verify PODs, achieving good coverage and building a basis for trusting the full system. Knowledge of "Accidentology" from Warwick will guide the testing process, proposing interesting circumstances and

Verification techniques is one of the primary focuses of the TSL, ranging from formal theorem proving through to test generation and coverage driven techniques. With the range of possible scenarios that autonomous vehicles can encounter being increadibly large, a methodology will be needed for transforming domain specific knowledge (on the causese of accidents) into suitable tests that can assure correctness in a reasonable amount of time.

Given that complete testing of any large system is infeasible, CAPRI touches on one of the central themes of the TSL: how can we go about building a body of evidence to show that a robotic system is trustworthy, in the absence of a strong proofs?

For more information about CAPRI, see our partner's press release.