At this year’s Cenex Expo, held at the Millbrook Proving Ground between 3-4 September, Bristol-based tech company Fusion Processing Ltd showcased a self-driving bus produced in partnership with Alexander Dennis for deployment on public roads in Cambridgeshire.Truck & Bus Builder spoke again with Jim Hutchinson, Fusion’s chief executive officer, to get an update on the company.

The two government-funded projects are on driverless operations inside a bus depot and automating trucks used in road safety and maintenance.

These partners will collaborate on the development and integration of hydrogen fuel cell technology into commercial vehicles, aiming to create high-performance drivetrains optimised for UK conditions.

The vehicle in question – a battery electric ‘Enviro100’ which has been retrofitted with Fusion’s ‘CAVstar’ automated driving system – is now being tested in order to calibrate and fine tune the self-driving system before it is put into service.

When Jim Hutchinson – today the CEO and founder of Fusion Processing Ltd, an autonomous vehicle technology company based in Bristol – began his career in electronic engineering, he could not have imagined that the radar and sensor equipment he was working on would eventually be used to make buses and trucks that can drive themselves. “I can’t claim to have been that visionary [back then],” he told Truck & Bus Builder in an interview. The realisation dawned in the late 2000s, when Hutchinson saw that the growing need for sophisticated sensors in the automotive sector – used at that time for advanced driver assistance systems – would “ultimately” lead to self-driving vehicles navigating with a combination of cameras, radars, and other perception hardware.

The autonomous bus by Alexander Dennis will utilise an upgraded version of Fusion’s CAVStar autonomous driving software as it takes passengers along the 14-mile route across the Forth Road Bridge from the Ferrytoll Park & Ride in Fife to the Edinburgh Park Transport Interchange in Edinburgh.

There is a five-mile extension of the existing 14-mile autonomous bus trial (CAVForth) from Edinburgh Park station across the Forth Road Bridge in the UK in an attempt to gather more complex data, utilising an upgraded version of Fusion’s CAVStar autonomous driving software and ADL’s Enviro100EV electric bus.

The project brings together a consortium led by HVS and includes Fusion Processing and Asda.

UK bus and coach operator, Stagecoach, tested the first autonomous bus (Alexander Dennis Enviro200AV) to carry passengers over the Forth Road Bridge, near Edinburgh, as part of the CAVForth project.

The project brings together a consortium led by HVS and includes Fusion Processing, Grayson and PNDC.

Fusion Processing’s CAVstar control and sensing system will be used to make Bradshaw’s third generation electric T700 and T800 Tow Tractors, fully autonomous.

Enviro200 buses from Alexander Dennis Ltd have taken part in a pilot on-road autonomous passenger-less scheme, ahead of operations with passengers that are scheduled for later this year. Bus operator Stagecoach has been conducting the passenger-less tests over the course of two weeks