The Powerful Brain Behind Driverless Fleets Is Already Being Built

That day in the future when you get inside a self-driving bus to get to work, you’ll assume that the bus is programmed to drive you there as efficiently and safely as possible. Software will have replaced the driver who does that today. Perhaps more importantly, software will have also replaced those managing scores of busses at a control centre. Robin North is building the latter technology that will control those fleets from the mothership.

North and three other engineers spun out Immense Simulations from their British-government funded research group and are selling software that can coordinate thousands of driverless vehicles at once. Such cars will be “strategically autonomous” he says, because they’ll be synched up as part of a huge network.

Immense is targeting traditional fleet operators, city authorities like Transport for London and other new technology companies keen to enter the fledgling market.

Its software (pictured below) runs on a cloud-based, simulation platform from London startup Improbable. The platform can host large-scale, detailed simulations of cities, which allows Immense to simulate how cars would react to changes in the weather, pedestrians or other cars on the road.

Immense was one of the first companies to work with Improbable last year when the latter company first introduced its Spatial OS platform to early clients, many of whom were game developers.

“We were some of the first people through the door,” says North. “We set ourselves a challenge of, ‘Ok, you can do a big, scaleable, virtual world. Can you do a real one with millions of entities? What happens if you try and simulate Manchester?’”