Oxbotica & Google Cloud announce autonomous driving software partnership

Oxbotica has announced a new strategic collaboration with Google Cloud aimed at accelerating the adoption and deployment of its autonomous software platform.

The partnership will unite Google Cloud’s cloud infrastructure with Oxbotica’s AV software to develop scalable, safe, and reliable autonomous driving solutions for transportation and adjacent businesses. Google Cloud has cited last-mile logistics, light industry, and public transport companies as examples of such businesses. Oxbotica itself plans to utilize Google Cloud’s full suite of products — spanning compute, storage, networking, and data and analytics systems — to help develop, test, validate, and verify its self-driving technology. It will also leverage Google Cloud’s cyber-security technologies to ensure the secure use of autonomous mobility technologies.

Alongside the core development of its self-driving platform, Oxbotica will also use Google Cloud to generate digital twins in MetaDriver – its metaverse software that connects and controls virtual and physical fleets, while sending real-time analytics on performance. In doing so, it automatically generates a variety of virtual scenarios designed to improve the safety of autonomous vehicles.

Within these operations, Google Cloud will provide the data and machine learning tools that will help MetaDriver apply Oxbotica’s proprietary generative AI tools to its bank of virtual scenarios. Among these scenarios are unusual edge cases that can be economically, environmentally, or physically impractical to discover in conventional testing. For example, in the platform users can create a full, 24-hour, day-and-night cycle of sensor data, along with seasonal and extreme weather conditions, from a single data capture run.

In leveraging the scalability of the cloud, Oxbotica expects to benefit from reduced analysis and processing times for large datasets that its system can learn from across several use cases. This will help the company accelerate the turnaround of key insights – allowing for more testing and experimentation that improves the safety of its technology in turn. At the same time, Oxbotica expects that its partnership with Google Cloud will equally benefit its customers – allowing them to easily and quickly scale from single prototype vehicles to full fleets.

Oxbotica further intends to use Google Cloud infrastructure to develop new dedicated APIs for autonomous driving functions. For its customers, these APIs will support the creation of new applications and other products, and allow them to manage their existing data and services more easily. Together, Oxbotica and Google Cloud also intend to explore the larger impact of autonomous vehicles on areas such as congestion, public transit, and more.