Ignite by FORVIA HELLA and Samsung Electronics-owned Oxford Semantic Technologies (OST) have collaborated to create an explainable artificial intelligence solution designed to demonstrate road safety compliance for autonomous vehicles (AVs).
The partnership, demonstrated at Auto China 2026, combines simulation-based software with OST’s RDFox, a knowledge graph database initially developed by University of Oxford computer scientists. The technology addresses a barrier to transitioning from Level 2 partial driving automation to Level 3 conditional and Level 4 high automation, where legal liability shifts from the human driver to the vehicle manufacturer.
Unlike standard machine learning models that generate statistical outputs from patterns in large datasets, knowledge-based AI uses formal logic to produce traceable decisions. In an AV application, the software acts as an operational rulebook, capturing real-time vehicle actions and cross-referencing them against traffic laws to verify legal compliance.
Dr Felix Kortmann, CTO at Ignite by FORVIA HELLA, said:
“Hella Ignite.Drive applies knowledge-based AI by translating traffic laws, originally written for human interpretation, into machine-readable rule sets. This enables manufacturers to generate deterministic evidence that demonstrates safe and compliant vehicle behaviour for European type approval. At the same time, it reduces development lead times by minimizing the need for manual, market-by-market rule coding, helping AV teams move faster toward approval-ready deployment.”
Peter Crocker, CEO of Oxford Semantic Technologies, added:
“Autonomous vehicles currently use AI to make a whole range of decisions on the road – but at the moment manufacturers are struggling to show why or how these decisions are made. RDFox® can help with this major barrier to progress. What knowledge-based AI allows us to do is to collect and map these decisions and apply reasoning. We can see exactly why a vehicle acts in a certain way and use this data to help the vehicle make better decisions in the future.”