Following advanced street mapping in Milton Keynes (UK) city centre (known locally as MK), a new trial of autonomous shuttles has begun.
The Street Connected and Autonomous Vehicles project is led by Milton Keynes City Council and Smart City Consultancy with other partners. In the trial, fully accessible autonomous vehicles carry up to eight passengers around the city centre with multiple pick up and drop off points.
As part of the preliminary public engagement phase, the StreetCAV Ohmio LIFT shuttle was on display at the Milton Keynes Smart City Experience in The Centre:MK, the shopping mall that provided the location for the European Robotics League Smart Cities Challenge in 2023. With mapping complete, these distinctive AVs can now be seen in service on the streets of Milton Keynes. The trial is seen as a blueprint for shuttles in other parts of the UK.
The StreetCAV Ohmio LIFT shuttle has been developed by a consortium of private and public sector organisations, funded by the Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV). The consortium behind the project includes Smart City Consultancy, Ohmio, Milton Keynes City Council, BT Group, Electronics Computers and Systems Ltd. and CableFree.
The vehicles, supplied by Ohmio, which has its UK HQ in MK, have been specially designed to operate in city centre environments at low speeds (under 15mph). The shuttles are connected to a new city centre control room where they are supervised and managed remotely. For the initial operation, the vehicles have a fully trained safety operator on board ready to take control if needed.
The project has created around 15 high tech jobs in MK and recruited several recent local graduates from Cranfield University.
In recent years, the MK public authority has promoted MK as a test-bed for experimental urban technologies. The most well-known of these is the Starship Technologies‘ (largely) autonomous delivery robots: Milton Keynes provided its world-first urban deployment of these units in 2018.