Flourish – React AI

React AI undertook a £250,000 research programme into aspects of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs), as part of the Flourish project.

Flourish was a three-year, £5m research project involving multiple partners across industry, academia and government. React AI were the AI specialists in the consortium, providing our expertise at the vehicle and the traffic-network level, working closely with partners such as Airbus and Atkins. It was part-funded by Innovate UK, the UK Government’s innovation agency. See more at http://flourishmobility.com/

Pod Trials

Amongst other aspects of the project, we worked with the UK government’s Transport Systems Catapult (part of the Connected Places Catapult) to provide AI capability to an autonomous ‘pod’ vehicle, in colloboration with Airbus and the Bristol Robotics Laboratory.

This included collecting visual image data for training a novel neural network approach to route navigation

CAVs and Robotics

CAVs are a type of robotic system, and we saw Flourish as the perfect means for developing our software and applying it to the real world.

Access to the physical Pod was limited, and over the course of the project we developed a range of simulations and office-scale alternatives to continue our work.

Network-Level Machine Learning

To investigate the future impact of connected vehicles, the Flourish consortium has produced a micro-simulation of the Bristol region. Working with Atkins, this has been integrated with React AI’s cloud-based service to investigate the potential for neural networks to leverage the messages connected vehicles will produce, in order to produce accurate forecasts of traffic congestion.