Visitors, including crown prince Guillaume and crown princess Stéphanie, watched on as the five-strong team from 360 Lab took the autonomous Kia out for a spin around a small circuit.

“The last six months [were] crazy,” Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust research scientist and entrepreneur (SnT) Raphaël Frank told Delano, explaining that the project began from scratch in February 2018 on a limited budget. “With this car it’s the cheapest we can get to have a car drive autonomously. It’s simply because this is a project supported from the research centre. Foyer just joined today. They are the first partners.”

The partnership with Luxembourg insurance firm Foyer was signed at the opening of the SnT’s partnership day on Tuesday at Casino 2000. The agreement will enable Foyer to access risk metrics detected by the sensors on autonomous vehicles, such as information on how many pedestrians are in a given place and how other vehicles move.

“They are crucial for new insurance products, especially if we’re talking about autonomous driving where the human has to take over from time to time,” Frank explained.

The autonomous vehicle operates using machine learning from when it is driven manually around a given track. It takes images from a camera and data from the steering wheel. In a real-world situation the idea is that autonomous vehicles will gather this kind of data from other motorists in order to drive appropriately.

It is hoped the project will benefit from access to the electric and digital mobility cross-border test bed.