Oxbotica, the British-based autonomous vehicle software developer, has announced a new strategic collaboration with Google Cloud that will help accelerate the deployment of its autonomous software platform to customers around the world.
The partnership will combine Google Cloud’s expertise in cloud infrastructure with Oxbotica’s market-leading autonomous vehicle software to create scalable, safe, and reliable autonomous driving solutions for any business with transportation in its value chain. These businesses include last-mile logistics, agriculture, light industry, and public transport.
Oxbotica plans to use Google Cloud products—compute, storage, networking, and leading data and analytics products like Vertex AI—to help develop, test, validate, and verify its self-driving technology. It will also leverage Google Cloud’s proven cyber-security technologies to help ensure secure use of autonomous mobility technology.
Alongside the core development of its self-driving platform, Oxbotica will use Google Cloud to generate digital twins in Oxbotica’s MetaDriver, an AI-powered metaverse that connects and controls virtual and physical fleets together, sending real-time analytics on performance.
Oxbotica’s MetaDriver automatically generates a vast bank of virtual scenarios to help ensure the safety of autonomous vehicles. Google Cloud will provide the data and machine learning tools to enable MetaDriver to apply Oxbotica’s proprietary generative AI tools to the extensive bank of virtual scenarios including unusual edge cases that are often economically, environmentally or physically impractical to discover in conventional testing. For instance, a user can create a full, 24-hour, day-and-night cycle of sensor data, along with seasonal and extreme weather conditions, from one single data capture run.
By tapping into the scalability of the cloud, Oxbotica will be able to rapidly analyse and process these large datasets to learn across different use cases. This will speed up time-to-insights and allow for more testing and experimentation, which in turn will help improve the safety of the technology.
“We are thrilled to partner with Google Cloud to accelerate bringing autonomous driving solutions to market globally. Google Cloud is a global leader in cloud infrastructure and using its cutting-edge technology and AI powered tools will strengthen our proposition for our customers,” said Gavin Jackson, CEO of Oxbotica.
Oxbotica targets industrial use cases, where there is an urgent need to make the transition to autonomy today. Real-world applications of Oxbotica’s technology include passenger shuttles operating 24/7 on fixed routes in cities, where there is a driver shortage but increasing demand for services. For instance, in the UK, almost 1 in 10 bus driver positions are vacant, leading to shrinking bus networks across the country.
With Google Cloud, Oxbotica’s customers will be able to easily and quickly scale from single prototype vehicles to full fleets. In addition, the collaboration will enable Oxbotica to explore the larger impact of autonomous vehicles on congestion, public transit, and more.
Oxbotica intends to use Google Cloud infrastructure to make available application programming interfaces (APIs) for autonomous driving, which will enable its customers to create new lines of business (such as applications and other products), as well as more easily manage their existing data and services.
“The combination of Oxbotica’s leading technology and our reliable infrastructure and AI and data-enabled cloud platform has the potential to accelerate autonomous mobility in a variety of industrial use cases,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud. “From last mile logistics to public transportation, we look forward to working together to positively impact the lives of end users.”
