Road accidents, with their human and economic costs, are a serious problem in most industrialised countries. For example, in year 2000 in the European Community 40000 people died and 1.7 million were injured, because of road accidents.


The project dealt with the development of drive/ride assistance systems for preventive active safety. These advanced devices monitor the behaviour of the vehicle, estimate the risk of the actual driving conditions by comparing the planned manoeuvre with a reference 'safe' manoeuvres and provide warnings to the driver/rider if the risk level crosses a threshold. They should prevent accidents caused by distractions/careless driving, by excessive speed or unsafe headway.


The system architecture is made of three large functional blocks, named 'Scenario and Navigation System', 'Risk Assessment and Safe Manoeuvre Calculation' and 'Driver Feedback'.


In 2004 there were many ongoing and starting research projects on this topic, but most research projects (especially those driven by automotive industries) had short to medium time frames and aimed at early deployment of marketable products. In addition they focused mainly on cars, which represent the great majority of vehicles causing accidents. Conversely the present project aimed at developing basic research on a novel 'safe'-optimal manoeuvre planning core, as well as to address the second most important, yet neglected, category of vehicles, which are motorcycles. The two aspects (safe-optimal manoeuvre core and motorcycles) are interconnected, because motorcycles, due to their more complex dynamics, pose planning problems that are more challenging than cars.