This autonomous car waits to see how you drive before offering to take over

A spin-out company from the University of Oxford called Oxbotica has developed a new software system for making regular cars into driverless vehicles. The system, called Selenium, can ingest data from visual cameras, laser scanners, or radar systems. It then uses a series of algorithms to establish where the "it" is, what surrounds it, and how to move. "It takes any vehicle and makes it into an autonomous vehicle," explains Paul Newman, a professor at the University of Oxford and cofounder of Oxbotica. That sounds ambitious, but he's being serious: the team plans for the software to be used to control not just autonomous cars, but warehouse robots, forklifts, and self-driving public transport vehicles. Most systems being developed by other manufacturers rely on building a system that is robust enough to handle driving from the moment they are first switched on.