The European C-ROADS project has been launched, laying the foundations for autonomous vehicles

The European C-ROADS project has been launched, laying the foundations for autonomous vehicles
12/10/2017Press releases

It is estimated that by 2020 there will be up to 10 million cars connected in terms of data and autonomous vehicles worldwide. The Czech Republic wants to be ready for this, so it launched the European C-ROADS project. The Ministry of Transport and other project partners today signed a joint consortium agreement, which officially kicked off the C-ROADS project. The project will last until 2020, contribute to improving the transportation safety in Europe and lay the foundations for the use of cooperative systems and automated vehicle control, including autonomous vehicles.

The European C-ROADS project has been launched, laying the foundations for autonomous vehicles
Within the C-ROADS Czech Republic project, C-ITS systems will be deployed between 2017 and 2020 not only on the D1, D5, D11 motorways, but also in cities and urban public transportation areas or on railway crossings. Testing of the use of existing and new mobile technologies for the mutual communication between vehicles equipped with cooperative technologies will be an important part of the project. "The car industry and transportation are areas of rapid technological development. Manufacturers are testing not only alternative types of drives, but they are already testing automated vehicle control as well," says the Transport Minister Dan Ťok and adds: "Some car testing models are already equipped with technologies that implement data communication with transport systems. The objective is to teach vehicles share information with each other and communicate with the infrastructure, for example when passing information about ice on the road or arriving rescue service cars between vehicles and infrastructure. The drivers can then adapt their drive to this information."
The project, co-ordinated by the Ministry of Transport, is co-financed from the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF Transport) instrument. Eight main partners cooperate on it: AŽD Praha, ČVUT, INTENS Corporation, O2 Czech Republic, T-Mobile, ŘSD, SŽDC and Brněnské komunikace. Organisations, institutions and companies from the state, university and private sectors are also joining the project, e.g. Plzeňské městské dopravní podniky, Dopravní podnik Ostrava, ŠKODA AUTO and others. The total cost of the project is about EUR 18.9 million including the cost of testing, evaluation, cross-border operation and international negotiations of new standards.
Specific activities have been assigned to each partner in the C-ROADS project. They include LTE-V testing in the T-Mobile network and O2 will verify the technical capabilities of hybrid vehicle units for automatic data communication between vehicles. ŘSD will focus on the implementation of the infrastructure along motorways, AŽD and SŽDC will equip selected railway crossings with C-ITS pilot systems, BKOM will focus on C-ITS equipment of the access radial roads to Brno, INTENS is dealing with technical coordination and standardisation and ČVUT focuses primarily on the evaluation of test outputs. Information on all projects of the consortium is available at the project website www.c-roads.cz.
 

How does the C-ITS unit work

The current version of the C-ITS unit in the vehicle is a device that directly communicates at dedicated radio frequency 5.9 GHz with its "counterparts" on the infrastructure and in surrounding vehicles. There are nowadays several solutions are available on the market that can be fit in virtually any vehicle. The car makers have committed that they would equip selected models with this technology from 2019 on. It will be also possible to purchase the technology for older vehicles – the price for the unit will be several thousand crowns. The possibilities of using so-called hybrid systems which would simultaneously use a reserved radio frequency at 5.9 GHz and existing (LTE) or new (LTE-V, 5G) mobile technologies for increasing signal coverage and the security services offered are being researched at the same time.
The vehicles fitted with this system will receive this safety information and display it to the driver in the form of warning messages on the on-board information display or instrument board or as part of navigation information. In the future it is also expected that received messages will be integrated into the vehicle control systems, which will automatically prevent the accident or the emergence of a dangerous event. "We want to make sure that this does not distract drivers too much, but at the same time they are – early enough – warned visually and audibly when there is an imminent danger and/or informed about road work, driving times, traffic jams or other dangers," minister Ťok clarified.
Testing is already under way on a motorway section of the Prague Ring Road between Mirošovice and Rudná (parts of the D1, D0 and D5 motorways) where communication units were installed on the infrastructure and on selected vehicles belonging to ŘSD. These devices transmit information about the current driving times on the Prague Ring Road to their surroundings and information on the status of the traffic signs on the Line Traffic Control (LŘD) Portals and the Traffic Information System (ZPI). "What is displayed on the changing information boards or signs is displayed to the driver directly in the vehicle. Particularly with changing speed limits on the Line Traffic Control Portals or the dynamic closing of lanes in front of tunnels or in tunnels, this feature is important, because drivers often fail to respect these types of signs," the minister added.
It is also the maintenance vehicles of ŘSD, that are in charge of this motorway sections, that are equipped with C-ITS units. But they are also available to mobile trailers that indicate short-term work on motorways. Poor marking of the working site combined with driver's fatigue is the cause of too many accidents, which unfortunately also often have tragic consequences. These vehicles and trailers today send information about their location and/or the closure of a lane or speed limits to their surroundings. This way, the driver receives information about the nature of the closure or restriction already before he/she can physically spot it, which significantly reduces the risk of accidents. At the same time, they also send online information about their location and activities to the ŘSD server, so the maintenance centres are kept up-to-date about their car fleet.

The future

In the coming years some legislative and ethical issues (such as clearly define driver's and manufacturer's responsibilities) connected with higher levels of autonomous vehicles will still have to be resolved. Therefore, the transportation space in the Czech Republic is not yet ready for the operation of fully autonomous vehicles without a driver, but construction projects are already running. Also, project representatives, under the coordination of the Ministry of Transport, participate in international standardisation conferences and forums, organise internal expert discussions and make efforts to prepare the traffic world in the Czech Republic for the future.


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