Cooperation between Roads and Vehicles: Field Validation of a Novel Infrastructure-Based Solution for All Road Users’ Safety

Abstract

Cooperative intelligent transport systems (C-ITS) are expected to considerably influence road safety, traffic efficiency and comfort. Nevertheless, their market penetration is still limited, on the one hand due to the high costs of installation and maintenance of the infrastructures and, on the other hand, due to the price of support automated driving functions. A breakthrough C-ITS technological solution was studied, designed, built and tested that is based on the implementation of custom low-cost on-road platforms (named “strips”) that embed micro/nano sensors, communication technologies and energy harvesting to shift intelligence from the vehicle to the road infrastructure. The strips, through a V2X and LTE communication gateway, transmit real-time, reliable and accurate information at lane level about the environmental and road condition, the traffic and the other road users’ position and speed. The exchanged information supports a series of C-ITS functions and services extending equipped vehicles capabilities and providing similar functions to non-equipped ones (including powered two wheelers). The general framework and the technological solution proposed is presented and the results of the field trials, conducted in three pilot sites around Europe, quantify the promising system performance as well as the positive effects of the C-ITS applications developed and tested on driver/rider’s behavior.

Multi-Layered Local Dynamic Map for a Connected and Automated In-Vehicle System

“…It is built upon the concept of motion primitives and action selection [35]. Motion primitives are obtained from the solution of an Optimal Control Problem (OCP) that minimises the longitudinal jerk, which is known to model human-like manoeuvres [35,36] and also used to predict driver intention [37]. Their solution yields longitudinal trajectories for space, velocity, acceleration, and jerk.…”

On the Feasibility and Efficiency of Self-Powered Green Intelligent Highways

“…Shifting intelligence from vehicles to road infrastructure, an innovative C-ITS solution was introduced in [9]. The purpose was to improve road safety via the integration of Another study [21] used different methodologies for vehicle on-board energy harvesting from shock absorbers.…”

An Experiment and Simulation Study on Developing Algorithms for CAVs to Navigate Through Roadworks

“…While CAVs can remarkably improve highway mobility and safety [9], they will bring many technological and infrastructural implications and challenges. This is because CAV performance can be influenced by a number of factors such as roadworks, road surface conditions, merging and diverging sections, which can result in CAV disengagements [10], [11]. Roadworks are common along highways, present due to improvement and maintenance activities [9].…”

“…environment during roadworks. In roadworks, the road layout is altered and vehicles have to adapt their usual trajectories to travel reliably within the new road configuration [11]. However, CAVs may fail to navigate safely and experience difficulties because the base map available in their path planning module does not reflect the altered road layout [12].…”