Automotive Innovation Award for Pembroke Fellow Ingmar Posner and Team

Professor Ingmar Posner – Pembroke Fellow and Tutor in Engineering – is part of a team of engineers who have won the prestigious Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) Award for Innovation 2015 for their ground-breaking research project the LUTZ Pathfinder.

Helping to maintain the UK’s position at the forefront of research into the exciting field of self-driving vehicles, the LUTZ Pathfinder is a trial of three electric-powered self-driving pods on pedestrianised streets of Milton Keynes.

The two-seater pods are designed with the ability to navigate without GPS or external sources, thanks to the range of sensors they are equipped with, including stereo cameras, laser and radar-based detectors.

A statement on the SMMT website details additional aims of the project: ‘As well as trialling the future technology requirements for fully autonomous vehicles, LUTZ Pathfinder is also examining public attitudes towards the technology, and considering the legislative barriers that still have to be overcome before these vehicles can enter the mainstream’.

The winning project is a collaborative effort between the Mobile Robotics Group at the University of Oxford (of which Prof. Posner is co-leader), the Coventry-based RDM Group and Milton Keynes Council, and is overseen by the Transport Systems Catapult, a technology and innovation centre created to promote Intelligent Mobility. 

The Automotive Award for Innovation was founded to recognise UK-developed products, technologies, processes, or systems with the potential to have a substantial positive impact in the automotive industry.