ERSEC
Enhanced Road Safety by integrating Egnos-Galileo data with on-board Control system

Today road safety is a major concern and social issue. Although things have gradually improved in recent years, the number of road fatalities is still far too high in the European Union. In 2007, road accidents killed over 40,000 people and injured more than 1.2 million.

In 2001 the Commission issued a White Paper on European transport policy with an agenda for European transport policy through to 2010. The European Road Safety Action programme sets out, with the requisite level of detail, specific measures in accordance with what the Commission has already endorsed, and reaffirms the overall ambitious target of halving the number of road accident victims by 2010.

Many solutions exist for improving transport safety on transport and span from ADAS to collision mitigation and avoidance systems but none of these makes use of satellite-based positioning systems. As a matter of fact, the EGNOS/GNSS system has not yet been applied to road-active safety although the accuracy nowadays offered by such a system is in the order of metres. Such accuracy is sufficient to reduce the vehicle speed in the proximity of a curve but is not sufficient for warning the driver of all dangers in time and/or automatically intervening. Where a crash has been detected by other sensors, it needs to establish the best direction for deviating the vehicle trajectory in order to avoid the collision.

Description

The methodology proposed to achieve the ERSEC objectives is based on an intelligent fusion of different state-of-the-art sensing technologies, mainly:

1. EGNOS/GNSS receiver for automotive application that outputs the position of the equipped vehicle on the road map
2. road digital map and GIS
3. the vehicle crash prediction system (developed and tested in previous R&D activities) based on scanlasers, tachometer and gyro - that outputs the position in the equipped vehicle reference frame of the obstacles detected around the vehicle at the sampling rate of 40 Hz. The obstacles position is continuously predicted in a distance < 10 m from the vehicle, within the horizon of 0.5 s and with the accuracy of 0.1 m.

The ERSEC intelligent data fusion aims at achieving the positions of the equipped vehicle and of all the obstacles around it on the road map with the measurement accuracy of 0.1 metre at the sampling frequency of 100 Hz. The significant improvement in vehicle positioning accuracy - going from metres offered by the EGNOS-GNSS to decimetres @ 100 Hz - is an effect of the possibility of identifying fixed objects detected by the vehicle scanlaser with those indicated in the road map so to use them as reference markers for the measuring system and of the application of sophisticated mathematical fundamentals  based on the use of dynamic filters.

Objectives

ERSEC intends to contribute towards making vehicles safer. 

The motivation of the research starts from the availability of EICASDRIVE, a Collision Avoidance System developed by EICAS that automatically deviates the vehicle trajectory in the last fraction of second before an impending crash. A prototype of EICASDRIVE on an experimental car is at present under development as part of MECCANO, a research project aiming at developing a ‘new concept car’.

The general ERSEC objective is concerned with broadening the scope of road transport application of EGNOS/GNSS (and later Galileo) through an appropriate integration and data fusion with measurement data coming from other measuring instruments. 

In order to make the vehicle safer, the challenging ERSEC objective consists of achieving a significant improvement in the vehicle positioning accuracy, going from metres (offered by the EGNOS/GNSS) to decimetres, with an updating frequency of 100 Hz.

Specifically, ERSEC intends to develop an on board vehicle measuring system able to detect the position of the equipped vehicle and all the obstacles (such as other vehicles, people and any kind of fixed or mobile objects) around it with a measurement accuracy of the order of 0.1 metre at a sampling rate of 100 Hz.