Streetdrone to develop autonomous truck services

StreetDrone, a UK-based autonomous technology company is developing a fleet of 5G-connected autonomous trucks to help move parts and assemblies to Nissan’s Sunderland plant from local suppliers. The company is currently working on a project called 5G Connected and Autonomous Logistics (5G CAL) to assess how the technology can help to bring more efficiency into industrial supply chain operations.

The project’s consortium involves companies: Vantec, Sunderland City Council, Newcastle and Coventry Universities, a mobility innovator – Connected Places Catapult, and Perform Green, a sustainable performance consultancy. The consortium recently received 5G Create grant from the UK government to develop the project. 5G Create scheme is an open competition within the 5G Testbeds and Trials Programme offered by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport. Up to £30 million of government funding is being made available to explore and develop new use-cases and 5G technical capabilities.

Speaking on the project, StreetDrone said it will provide level 4 autonomous technology to modify heavy goods vehicles for autonomous driving by making use of the Vehicle-to-Vehicle infrastructure communications. The project will conduct trials at the Nissan factory in Sunderland to examine how the 5G technology can increase the productivity.

Mike Potts, CEO of StreetDrone expressed: “The reality is that autonomous cars are likely still many years from production, however using the technologies that we’ve already developed in an industrial logistics setting such as this makes sense in a much shorter time frame,”. He added: “I can see how the development that we’ll be doing as part of the CAVL project will quickly scale to many other industrial settings where reducing cost and increasing safety are critical factors in profitable operations.”

Mark Preston, StreetDrone Co-Founder explained further: “We are excited to work with the CAVL consortium in the North of England to demonstrate 5G as a key enabler in the roll-out of connected and autonomous vehicles. We look forward to accelerating StreetDrone’s capability in Level 4 Autonomy, and to taking advantage of 5G’s benefits (such as low latency teleoperation, Vehicle-Infrastructure communications, and Edge / Cloud computing) to make CAV logistics a real commercially viable proposition, and demonstrate this with an exciting end-user in Nissan Manufacturing UK.”

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Picture: StreetDrone