As little as two years from now, ye could be standing at a bus stop, when towards ye trundles not a bus, but a driverless shuttle, propelled by a quietly humming electric motor. That’s the hope of Paul Newman, the co-founder and chief technology officer of Oxbotica, a British company helping to make driverless vehicles a reality.
In 2014 Oxbotica was spun out of Oxford University, where Newman is a professor of information engineering. The company’s mission is to design the software that allows autonomous vehicles to safely navigate their surroundings. Oxbotica won’t be the next Tesla; it won’t build tomorrow’s automobiles. Nor will it be the next Uber, marshalling fleets of them around the world’s cities. In fact, the comparison for which Newman reaches