Overview
The main objective of the 5G NetMobil project is to develop a comprehensive communication infrastructure for tactile connected driving and to demonstrate the advantages of tactile connected driving in terms of traffic safety, traffic efficiency and environmental impact compared to autonomous driving based solely on local sensor data.
While autonomous driving already promises more comfort and safety, tactile networked driving enables new driving strategies that further increases road traffic safety, significantly reduces carbon dioxide emissions and significantly improves road traffic efficiency through better capacity utilization and reduced risk of traffic jams and accidents.
Additional networking possibilities will eliminate the fundamental limitations of today's autonomous system approaches, which use only the information obtained by locally installed onboard sensors for vehicle control. The decision horizon is thus extremely restricted, since the "visibility of the vehicle" is limited by the sensor technologies used, in particular radar and camera sensors. The sensors of all vehicles as well as the environment or the existing infrastructure (e.g. surveillance cameras at intersections or on motorways, geolocal weather sensors, etc.) can be combined virtually in the network, which contributes to better decision-making and in particular provides information about regions and scenarios that are still far away from the vehicle but are relevant for guidance.
Direct communication between vehicles also expands their field of vision and enables new applications leading to increased efficiency and comfort. The information obtained in this way can be supplied to all vehicles by a central decision-making authority and can thus be used to control and regulate the local actuators. For the resulting control loops, transmission latency times in real time, which means a few milliseconds, are absolutely necessary.