Speaker: Tom Robinson, Technical Director at Conigital

With a computer science and software engineering background, Tom has gained over 30 years of experience of which 22 years has been within the automotive sector. A significant portion of this time has been in building ITS and CAV capability within organisations (Ricardo, InnovITS and more recently Applus IDIADA).

An experienced project director and business unit leader who has been responsible for multiple commercial developments both within the automotive and the structural monitoring sectors. Commercial projects examples include infotainment modelling and requirements management and product automotive infotainment systems

Tom has wide ranging experience managing European and UK funded research projects including; SARTRE, An EU FP7 project developing and exploring the issues around a mixed vehicle type road train that can operate on public highways; FootLITE – a TSB sponsored project looking at driver behaviour and coaching to improve road safety and fuel efficiency; and Sentience – an InnovITS sponsored project looking at using road and topological data to improve the efficiency of a hybrid vehicle.

UK Autodrive was an ambitious three-year project that concluded in October 2019 with the successful trials and demonstrations of connected and self-driving vehicles on the streets of Milton Keynes and Coventry. Tata Motors developed two autonomous cars and in this talk the vehicle architectures and system development will be explored.

 Dr. Mark Tucker is Lead Engineer in the Electrical Engineering group at Tata Motors European Technical Centre. He has recently delivered the autonomous vehicle motion control platform for the Tata Hexa and was part of the team that successfully demonstrated autonomous operation in Coventry and Milton Keynes as part of the UK Autodrive (UKAD) project. Mark has previously worked in research, development and application roles across marine, aerospace and automotive industries. In automotive he has worked on driver assistance systems and electric vehicles and applied Kalman filtering to sensor fusion, simultaneous localization and mapping and electric vehicle state-of-charge estimation. Mark has a Bachelor of Engineering from the University of Bristol, and a PhD in Control Engineering from the University of Leicester.

Speaker: Efimia Panagiotaki from StreetDrone

Efimia Panagiotaki is working as a Software Engineer at StreetDrone, an Oxford-based start up building connected autonomous-ready vehicles for autonomous fleets and R&D projects. Her main responsibilities include end-to-end integration testing of Autoware, the development of the vehicle’s ROS interface and the development of the Gazebo simulation vehicle model.

She studied Electrical and Computer Engineering at NTU Athens. At the final year of her studies, she joined AMZ Driverless Formula Student team of ETH Zurich, and conducted her Master Thesis at the Computer Vision module of the project. After finishing her studies, she started working at Williams Racing Formula 1 Team, combining her Motorsport and Software Engineering background. Autonomous mobile robots are her main research interest, thus she is working at StreetDrone, developing the software for the company’s R&D Self-Driving vehicle.

StreetDrone’s mission is to speed up the adoption of self-driving technology by putting safe, connected autonomous vehicles on the road. StreetDrone XenOS provides vehicle interfaces with functionally safe drive by wire and interoperable cloud connectivity. StreetDrone is a founding member of Autoware Foundation, a non-profit organization supporting open-source projects enabling self-driving mobility.

Nick Carpenter is Technical Director of UK-based Delta Motorsport, leading all R&D, design and simulation activities. Prior to establishing Delta Motorsport, Nick has held a variety of engineering positions in the road and race car sectors.

After graduating from Loughborough University with a BEng (Hons) in Automotive Engineering, he spent 4 years working in mainstream automotive Tier 1 companies before joining Reynard Motorsport as a design engineer in 1996. Over the next 5 years he worked his way up to the position of Assistant Chief Designer on the 02S Le Mans prototype race car. Nick then moved to take a role as Chief Engineer at Piper Design in London, leading the engineering team on a variety of projects from the FP1 Foggy Petronas race motorcycle to a hydrogen fuel cell hybrid city car.

Delta Motorsport has carried out a wide variety of road and race car programs, and in recent years it has broadened its capabilities significantly into the electric and hybrid sector, and now carries out high voltage systems design and engineering projects for a number of clients, including mainstream vehicle manufacturers. This capability has been demonstrated through the design and build of Delta’s own all-new electric passenger car, the E-4 Coupe.

Speaker: George Filip from KTN 

George Filip is the Knowledge Transfer Manager for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles. He is currently finishing writing up his PhD thesis on the theme of Trust and Calibration of Trust in CAVs at the University of Nottingham, Faculty of Engineering, after previously having obtained a Bachelors Degree in Philosophy and Social Sciences as well as a Masters’ Degree in Contemporary Philosophy.

Michael is Head of Strategy at Meridian. He is on secondment from the UK Government’s Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV), of which he was a founding member in 2015.

Prior to CCAV, Michael was Head of Horizon Scanning in the Government’s Horizon Scanning Programme, establishing a cross-Government Emerging Technologies Community of Interest reporting to the Cabinet Secretary’s Advisory Group.