NEWS

In December, the Darwin team completed the Darwin Advent Wellbeing Challenge: we managed to walk a total of one million steps over the Advent period. We planned to celebrate our success by planting a tree at Harwell campus for each day of the challenge. The planting itself was slightly delayed by frost. On Tuesday 27 April, though, we were able to plant our wellbeing challenge trees! A small group of Darwin employees went to the campus to help. Aided by Harwell’s STFC and gardening teams, Daniela, Ram, Soheyl, Richard and Rodrigo worked together to get the trees into the soil. It’s particularly appropriate that Ram was involved in commemorating Darwin’s achievement, as he was one of our most enthusiastic walkers! In the end, we planted 25 trees, rather than the originally planned 24. Most of Harwell’s new trees line roads on the campus, with three planted near the Darwin SatCom Lab. Three of the trees are mature Chinese red birches, and the others are young trees: a mixture of crab apple, whitebeam, hawthorn, maple, rowan, sweetgum and silver birch. We’re looking forward to watching them grow. Hopefully, Darwin’s contribution will be visible at Harwell for many years to come. If you’re interested in learning more about Darwin and sustainability, our green strategy document outlines some of the work we’re doing in this area. You can see some more shots from the day below. Many thanks to Daniela Petrovic and Sonali Subhedar for contributing their photographs! Darwin Innovation Group is a UK-based company that provides services related to autonomous vehicles and communications. If you’re interested in working with us, take a look at our careers page. If you’d like to know how we can help your organisation make use of autonomous vehicles, contact us. You can also follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter.

In a recent post, we talked about mobile technology, and about the differences between the different generations. We touched on the fact that 5G technology offers possibilities going far beyond mobile phones. In this post, we’re going to take a closer look at that. 5G and transportation We’re on the verge of exciting developments in the transport industry: self-driving cars, smart roads, immersive in-car entertainment, improvements to safety and reductions to environmental impact. 5G is the technology driving many of these changes. 5G is particularly important for autonomous vehicles, which need to process and transmit large quantities of data, and to be able to communicate with each other in real time. There are some interesting ways 5G-enabled autonomous vehicles might change our roads. For example, you may begin to see vehicles travelling unusually close together. Many of the road rules that currently exist are based on the assumption that a human will be driving. For example, in good conditions, you need to leave a distance of at least two seconds between your car and the car in front, in case the car ahead of you suddenly stops. As a human driver, you need time to notice that the car ahead of you is stopping, time to react to the realisation by braking yourself, and then time for the brakes to stop your car. If an autonomous vehicle can connect to the one in front through 5G, however, it doesn’t need time to notice the vehicle ahead is braking, or to make the decision to brake itself. 5G’s low latency means that information can be sent by one vehicle and received by others in almost the same instant. This lets two or more connected vehicles accelerate or brake simultaneously, with the one in front setting the pace. In other words, with 5G communication, autonomous vehicles can safely take actions that would be risky or impossible for a human driver, freeing up space on the road. There are other ways 5G can benefit drivers. For example, road sensors or cameras could feed information about traffic to 5G-enabled traffic lights. If the traffic lights have real-time information on actual traffic, they can adjust their timings to be as efficient as possible, rather than changing at pre-programmed times. In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Carnegie Mellon University has experimented with smart traffic signals and discovered that they could lead to substantial improvements for both drivers and the environment, reducing the time spent waiting by 40% and projected emissions by 21%. This experiment is from 2012 and therefore predates 5G, but it helps to illustrate how communications technology can be used to transform roads in ways that benefit everyone. Medical uses of 5G technology During the COVID-19 pandemic, many people have discovered the frustrations of a slow internet connection when trying to work remotely, and particularly when making video calls. For remote medical consultations, it’s particularly important to have a connection that can transmit a lot of data very quickly. After all, it’s hard to diagnose a problem through a low-definition video call; the video needs to be high-quality so the consultant can see any visible symptoms clearly. In situations like this, 5G’s large capacity for data transmission can be very valuable. If it’s feasible to have checkups over a video call, this could free up time for overstretched GPs, improve the health of people who don’t live near a surgery and reduce the time vulnerable patients spend in waiting rooms, where they might be exposed to airborne illness. O2 has a video explaining how 5G can be used in ‘smart ambulances’, helping paramedics in the ambulance communicate with medical specialists elsewhere. This reduces strain on hospitals, as in some cases the patient can be treated in the ambulance, and it enables a faster response to medical emergencies, such as strokes. Through projects like this, 5G can be used to save lives. 5G in other industries We’ve only touched on a few examples, to give a general overview of what 5G can be used for, but there are many areas where 5G can offer practical improvements. For example, we talked recently about drone applications. Many of these – filming, aerial photography, mapping, gathering environmental information etc. – involve the transfer of a lot of data, which 5G can facilitate. 5G could also help autonomous delivery drones to communicate, avoid obstructing each other and navigate to their destination. If you’re interested in learning more about the potential of 5G, O2’s Solutions Navigator offers a wide variety of situations where 5G might be useful. In its 2021 report ‘The Impact of 5G on the European Economy’, Accenture predicts huge economic benefits from 5G’s potential to create new industries, improve productivity and enhance products and services: ‘Between 2021 and 2025, 5G will drive up to €2.0 trillion in total new sales across all major industries in the European economy. Over this time period, 5G will create or transform up to 20 million jobs and drive up to €1.0 trillion to GDP.’ As a step forward in mobile technology, 4G opened up the potential for online activities that often needed a faster connection than 3G: video streaming, for example, or playing games. 5G’s potential is very different. Its relatively huge speeds give it many real-world applications, making it a valuable tool for multiple industries. 4G’s domain is the internet, but 5G’s domain is the world. We’ve reached the present, but there’s more to come in this series of articles on connectivity. In the near future, we’ll be talking about the possibilities of 6G, and about satellite technology. Darwin Innovation Group is a UK-based company that provides services related to autonomous vehicles and communications. If you’re interested in working with us, take a look at our careers page. If you’d like to know how we can help your organisation make use of autonomous vehicles, contact us. You can also follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter.

We are pleased to announce that the Darwin website is now available in Spanish! You can access the Spanish version of the site by clicking this link, or by switching languages in the drop-down menu at the top right of each page. Many thanks to Leticia, our translator, for her hard work preparing all the Spanish text. You may notice that a few things are still in English on the Spanish site; for example, the blog posts aren’t yet available in Spanish. These are currently being translated, and we’ll have Spanish versions soon. We’re also opening a Spanish Darwin office in Málaga, which is going to offer exciting new facilities. We’re looking forward to showing you around. Darwin Innovation Group is a UK-based company that provides services related to autonomous vehicles and communications. If you’re interested in working with us, take a look at our careers page. If you’d like to know how we can help your organisation make use of autonomous vehicles, contact us. You can also follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Many of us use 4G or 5G technology on a daily basis: to connect to the internet on our phones, for example. What is this technology, though? How do 3G, 4G and 5G work, and what are the differences between them? We’re going to take a look at those questions here. What does the ‘G’ in ‘5G’ stand for? The ‘G’ in terms like 3G, 4G and 5G stands for ‘generation’. So, for example, 5G means ‘fifth generation’. This can feel a bit vague. The fifth generation of what, exactly? The generations refer to mobile telecommunications technology. The ‘mobile’ here means wireless and therefore capable of being moved around, rather than only referring to mobile phones. Mobile phones are the most obvious hardware making use of this technology, of course, so we’ll be talking a lot about them in this post, but it also has many other applications. For example, connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) can make use of 5G to communicate with each other. This way, self-driving cars can alert each other to accidents or congestion, letting them change their routes to avoid traffic jams. How does mobile technology work? Terrestrial communication networks, such as 3G, 4G and 5G networks, rely on Earth-based masts to receive and transmit signals. You may have seen a 4G tower, for example. As these are essentially situated on the planet, whether they’re at ground level or at the top of a building, they are terrestrial. In contrast, satellite networks relay signals using satellites in space. Your mobile phone converts information, such as your voice on a call, or your request for a webpage, into radio waves. It sends these radio waves out to be picked up by the nearest mast. The mast processes the information from your phone and transmits it to wherever it needs to go; it connects to the internet on your behalf, say, or transmits a signal to the device you’re trying to contact. This may involve communicating with other masts, if, for example, you’re trying to call someone who’s not within range of the same mast. It then retrieves any response and sends it back to you. The networks created by these connected masts are sometimes called cellular networks, because each mast provides connectivity to a defined area, or ‘cell’. A brief overview of mobile generations As mentioned, the generations are confined to mobile technology. More specifically, they apply to technology relying on cellular networks, so early radio telephones don’t entirely fit in, although you’ll sometimes hear them referred to as 0G. Of course, it’d take a long time to go over every difference between the generations of mobile technology, but we can give a quick overview here. 1G refers to the technology behind the first-generation mobile phones of the 1980s. This wasn’t called 1G at the time; the name came about after 2G was introduced. Unlike the later generations, all of which are digital, 1G devices used analogue radio waves to transmit information. 2G refers to the technology used by the digital mobile phones introduced in the 1990s, which allowed text and picture messages to be sent between phones for the first time. Neil Papworth, an engineer testing the technology, sent the first SMS text message on 3 December 1992. Papworth used a computer, as phones didn’t yet have keyboards, but Richard Jarvis of Vodafone received the message on his mobile phone, an Orbitel 901. It was ‘Merry Christmas’. Although some 2G devices could connect to the internet at slow rates, 3G networks, introduced in 2001, made mobile internet access more widespread and much faster. 3G’s greater data capacity meant it could be used for, for example, video calls or watching relatively low-resolution videos on wireless devices. 4G networks were introduced in 2009, and they’re still widely relied upon, despite the introduction of 5G. 2G and 3G marked substantial changes to what we considered phones to be capable of – 2G made the switch from analogue to digital signals and introduced text messaging; 3G popularised mobile internet use – but the main difference between 3G and 4G was speed. 4G is up to five times faster than 3G, making it far more useful for streaming and playing games: activities that many of us have found very valuable in the past year. Due to its higher speeds, 4G technology contributed hugely to the popularisation of smartphones. 5G: where we are now 5G is the most recent generation, and mobile providers started offering it in 2019. Its data capacity is dramatically higher than 4G, making it much faster and able to accommodate more users at once. However, that high capacity is in part obtained by using high-frequency radio waves. Although they can carry more information, high-frequency signals can’t travel as far as signals at a lower frequency, so more masts are required to provide coverage to the same area. High-frequency signals can also struggle to pass through obstacles, such as walls, meaning gradual investment is necessary to build indoor 5G coverage. The expense and time of establishing complete 5G coverage, both indoors and outdoors, may help to explain why 4G still dominates mobile phone use. Mobile providers such as O2 are still investing in 4G infrastructure to support 4G users, and to make sure 5G devices can still connect to 4G networks when 5G isn’t available. 4G and 5G technologies are expected to coexist for the foreseeable future. So, if 4G is still the dominant mobile technology, why are we so excited about 5G? Well, as we mentioned earlier, this technology isn’t just for mobile phones. 5G’s high data capacity lets buildings, vehicles and robots send large amounts of data to each other almost instantaneously, and that opens up new technological paths to us. We’ll take a look at those new paths in future posts. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be talking about the potential of 5G for smart roads, CAV convoying and medical care, and what we can expect from 6G. Darwin Innovation Group is a UK-based company that provides services related to autonomous vehicles and communications. If you’re interested in working with us, take a look at our careers page. If you’d like to know how we can help your organisation make use of autonomous vehicles, contact us. You can also follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter. Cover photograph by Frederik Lipfert of Speedcheck.

What makes a vehicle autonomous? It’s not a straightforward question. If a car can drive itself in most situations, but a person needs to stay at the steering wheel in case there’s an emergency, is that an autonomous car? To tackle this problem, SAE International, a global developer of engineering standards, created the ‘levels of driving automation’. This is a six-point scale to classify the autonomy level of vehicles, running from 0 to 5. We’re going to take an in-depth look at the six levels of vehicle autonomy, and at where we are now. Vehicle autonomy level 0 The lowest level of vehicle autonomy is level 0. You might expect a level-0 vehicle to have no autonomous features at all, but in fact it may have minor features to support or warn the driver. For example, automatic emergency braking when the vehicle detects that it’s about to collide with something, or proximity sensors that warn the driver of obstacles when parking The human driver is driving at all times. The vehicle may be able to offer warnings, or to take quick action in emergency situations, but it can’t perform the day-to-day driving procedures of acceleration, steering and ordinary braking by itself. Without the driver, the vehicle wouldn’t be able to move at all. Vehicle autonomy level 1 At level 1, a vehicle has features that assist the driver with either steering or speed control, i.e. acceleration and braking. For example, a car might have adaptive cruise control. This allows it to detect any vehicles in front of it on the road, and to change its speed if necessary to stay at a safe distance. This would be a level 1 car, unless it has other autonomous features that move it up to level 2. Again, the autonomous features can assist, but a human is driving the vehicle at all times. Adaptive cruise control can make long drives easier, but it can’t drive a car on its own. Vehicle autonomy level 2 At level 2, a vehicle can assist the driver with both steering and speed control. For example, take the hypothetical level 1 vehicle that has adaptive cruise control. If you add an autosteer feature that keeps the car centred in the lane, it’s now a level 2 vehicle. The vehicle still can’t be said to be capable of driving itself at level 2, although it may be able to travel some distance without intervention. There are situations the vehicle won’t be able to respond to appropriately, such as approaching a traffic light. It’s the human driver’s responsibility to supervise the vehicle’s automated features at all times. As the driver, you need to keep your hands on the steering wheel, stay aware of your surroundings and be prepared to take action at any moment. The dividing line between driver support and automated driving The SAE levels of autonomy can be divided into two sets of three: 0 to 2, and 3 to 5. At the levels we’ve looked at so far, the automated features of the vehicle are driver support features. Up to and including level 2, you, the human driver, are responsible for the vehicle at all times. You need to stay alert and aware constantly, with your hands on the steering wheel and your eyes on the road. The vehicle can assist you, but it can’t drive itself; that’s your job. From level 3 upwards, you’re not the one driving. You’re there to assist the automated systems, rather than the other way around. At levels 0, 1 and 2, the vehicle is considered to be providing support to the driver, rather than driving itself. At levels 3, 4 and 5, the vehicle is capable of automated driving. Vehicle autonomy level 3 At the lower levels, a human is driving or at least supervising at all times. In some scenarios, though, a level 3 vehicle can handle itself. In addition to steering, braking and accelerating, it can monitor its environment and react to particular situations. For example, it can recognise that a nearby car is moving more slowly, make the decision to pass it and perform the passing manoeuvre itself. This is the first level at which, as the human in the car, you can take your eyes off the road. However, a level 3 vehicle can only drive itself in specific, limited situations. Outside those situations, the vehicle will ask you to take over, so you’ll need to be available to drive at all times. SAE gives the example of traffic jam chauffeur technology, which can handle the vehicle in traffic jams below a certain speed. During the traffic jam, you can engage the technology, freeing yourself up to focus on other things. When you’re clear of the traffic jam, though, you’ll be required to take over driving again. Vehicle autonomy level 4 At vehicle autonomy level 4, the vehicle can drive itself without any human input beyond being given a destination. It can find its own way while steering, accelerating, braking and responding to other traffic as necessary. It won’t be able to do this everywhere – it’ll probably be helpless if you drop it in the middle of a field, for example – but it should be able to drive itself in areas that are thoroughly mapped and monitored, once it’s received all the information it needs to handle the area. At all the previous levels, you needed a qualified human driver in the vehicle, either to do the actual driving or to take over when necessary. At level 4, you can climb into the vehicle and let it transport you even if you don’t have a driving licence yourself. In fact, you don’t necessarily need a person in the car at all. When a human driver isn’t needed, entirely new possibilities open up. A level 4 vehicle might serve as a driverless taxi, for example, trained to carry people around a particular area. It can travel from the destination to the next customer without human involvement, and the people it picks up don’t need to be capable of driving. Vehicle autonomy level 5 We’ve now moved fully into the theoretical. At level 5, a vehicle is perfectly autonomous. It doesn’t need a human driver; it doesn’t need to be familiar with an area; it can find its own way through any terrain, in any conditions. A level 5 vehicle should be able to handle any situation that a human driver could. At first glance, levels 4 and 5 can look very similar. In both cases, the vehicle can travel entirely by itself; the difference is that a level 4 vehicle can only do this in limited conditions. In fact, there’s a large gulf between level 4 and level 5. At level 4, the autonomous systems have all the information that they need to operate in a particular area. At level 5, the vehicle needs to be able to work out how to respond to a situation by itself, without guidance. This makes level 5 vehicle autonomy a more distant goal, but it’s one that we’re working towards. Where we are now There are exciting developments taking place in the field of vehicle autonomy, some of them being researched at our own SatCom Lab. Level 3 technology exists already, and level 4 technology is being developed. However, autonomous vehicles can only be driven on public roads if the law allows, and the technology must be tested thoroughly and shown to be safe before regulations can be changed. Because of this, you won’t usually see anything over level 2 on today’s UK roads. Level 2 might not seem that impressive, particularly as a vehicle’s only technically considered capable of automated driving at level 3. However, when you consider it, even level 2 is a remarkable achievement. It’s the first point at which a vehicle can travel any distance without the involvement of the human driver beyond monitoring the situation. At level 1, you’re always responsible for at least one crucial, constant aspect of driving: speed control or steering. At level 2, you may only be able to activate the automated features in particular situations – travelling down a long road, for example – but, while they’re active, you can just sit with your hands on the wheel and stay alert while your vehicle carries you along. We have an exciting future ahead of us, but it’s worth taking a moment to admire how far we’ve come already. Now, thanks to the work of countless people, true automated driving is just around the corner, and we’re playing our part to get us there. Darwin Innovation Group is a UK-based company that provides services related to autonomous vehicles and communications. If you’re interested in working with us, take a look at our careers page. If you’d like to know how we can help your organisation make use of autonomous vehicles, contact us. You can also follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter.