Project ASLAN steers a new course for autonomous urban mobility
Unprecedented international collaboration to accelerate the commercial viability of autonomous vehicles in cities with the launch of a fully-functional open-source selfdriving platform
- Global not-for-profit open-source collaboration with founders from Australia, Asia-Pacific and Europe
- The project announces ‘go live’ on a completely free and rapidly deployable open-source self-driving software stack for urban low speed autonomy
- Project ASLAN invites additional capability to supplement the founders from self-driving software development companies, leading technology universities, transport authorities, cybersecurity experts and self-driving hardware engineers
- Solution based on the world’s largest and most successful robotics framework, ROS, providing seamless access to millions of engineers and developers
- Project ASLAN charter aligns with World Economic Forum Guidelines for City mobility:Steering towards collaboration
Oxford, UK, 01 July 2020: The potential social, commercial and environmental benefits of autonomous mobility that have the capability to transform gridlocked and polluted cities are not being realised quickly enough.
So says Project ASLAN, a new international not-for-profit collaboration between commercial enterprise, leading technology universities, transport authorities and selfdriving hardware and software engineers drawn from around the world that aims to solve this problem.
To accelerate the progression of driverless technology, Project ASLAN today launched an open-source and rapidly deployable self-driving software platform. The free and open software stack has been launched expressly to foster engineering collaboration.
The platform provides mature and stable code combined with plug and play ease of use, offering real-world self-driving capability validated by public highway trials as well as complete simulation capability for users without access to driverless vehicle hardware.
The collaboration’s founder members and advisory board represent a wide spectrum of skills unified by a common purpose and world-class expertise, including HAN University of Applied Sciences, Holland, RoboSense, an advanced LiDAR technology company, StreetDrone, the end-to-end urban mobility company, cybersecurity experts, Enkrypta, Jim O’Reilly, Strategic Product and Innovation Manager at Ordnance Survey, Prof Siraj Ahmed Shaikh, Professor of Systems Security at the Institute of Future Transport and Cities (IFTC) at Coventry University, Garry Staunton of RACE (Remote Applications in Challenging Environments) as part of Testbed UK and Hai L. Vu, Professor, Intelligent Transport Systems at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.
Project ASLAN has identified the high investment demands required to pursue end-toend driverless technologies presents a clear barrier to progress. The project has set itself the ambition to remove these barriers to entry and prioritise the benefits of driverless vehicles for metropolitan and low speed use cases where the benefits are the greatest and a collaborative approach is already determined by the involvement of multiple public agencies and private companies.
By focusing on a more defined operational domain based on slow speeds in cities as well as embracing an open-source approach, Project ASLAN opens up a smaller problem to a far larger group of collaborative engineering capability from across the world.
At www.project-aslan.org, engineers can freely download an open-source resource enriched by software contributed by the founders and augmented with data from 22 autonomous vehicles currently deployed in a variety of trial use-cases in locations ranging from Hong Kong to the UK.
A quote from Jan Benders (Program Manager Control Systems) a member of the ASLAN Advisory Board:
"Vehicle autonomy requires solutions containing high levels of complexity. Open collaboration is key in tackling the challenges to bring robust solutions to the market. It also allows universities to bring research to a higher level of applicability. By focusing on a limited - low-speed - ODD, ASLAN further accelerates the development of urban vehicle autonomy. Hence, HAN is proud to be partner in this initiative."
