Overview
Autonomous mobility will, in the future, be fully integrated in road traffic as well as in everyday life. For example, for green space maintenance, city cleaning and winter service. Harsh environmental conditions such as heavy fog or snow or special traffic conditions (e.g. a vehicle is located between two trucks) highly limit the accuracy of a vehicle´s environment detection and preventing an autonomous operation. Many applications such as automated lane selection in the crossing areas, green space maintenance and city cleaning require a guaranteed operation, which can only be ensured with infrastructure support.
ACTIVE investigates the interactions between autonomous vehicles and the transport infrastructure needed for a guaranteed autonomous operation under realistic environmental conditions. The obtained research results are used to derive data quality requirements and potentials of transport infrastructure for autonomous mobility. Due to the lack of legal and technical prerequisites for using autonomous vehicles on public roads, the practical applicability of the project results will be proved by a winter service scenario in defined test environment. The test environment consists of an autonomous vehicle (stage 5) and a test area near Graz equipped with an infrastructure node expanded with new technologies allowing for highly accurate position determination.
This pioneering combination allows for the first time to reason about the necessary quality of infrastructure data for precise vehicle manoeuvring and the influence of movement and environmental conditions. To achieve these ambitious goals more research questions are addressed: First, the integration of information security in the functional safety concept preventing people hazards. Second, methods for the quantitative assessment of a vehicle´s environment detection capability under different environmental conditions. The research results of ACTIVE will show that the infrastructure can guarantee the required data quality for fast, accurate and reliable autonomous driving even under harsh environmental conditions. Thus ACTIVE makes an important contribution to the autonomous mobility.