More powerful and reliable on-board perception and decision-making technologies addressing complex environmental conditions (CCAM Partnership)

To achieve secure and trustworthy interaction between vehicles, infrastructure and road users, robust (e.g. weather resilient) and accurate on-board environment positioning and perception systems are essential for the extraction of reliable information required for real-time driving decision-making. Furthermore, advanced on-board decision-making functionalities need to handle the diversity of use cases in their respective operational domains. Such functionalities have to guarantee the safety and reliability of future automated vehicles, which will integrate complex in-vehicle systems-of-systems with advanced sensors, control and actuators, relying on extensive computational power and an increased dependency on software for decision-making.

The proposed actions are expected to address the development and demonstration of each of the following aspects:

• More powerful and reliable embedded in-vehicle perception systems with increased performance, (weather) resilience and accuracy based on enhanced sensing, localization (with reliable, dynamic, high-definition digital maps, reliable and precise location from EU satellite navigation services) and improved object/person classification and cognition (with greater integration with infrastructure-based perception systems and other vehicles to complete data fusion and real time updates).
• System self-assessment methods for environment perception technologies and improved hardware integration into the vehicle need also to avoid reliability issues due to environmental stresses, temperature shifts, vibrations, potential malicious attacks, low speed crashes, etc.
• On-board, real-time, fail-safe, unambiguous and traceable decision-making systems for safe Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) based on complex in-vehicle systems-of-systems requiring extensive computational power and highly advanced algorithms in order to address complex traffic scenarios (with VRU). These systems should be cost effective and respecting the protection of personal data with improved minimum risk manoeuvres in the event that the limit of the ODD is reached or in the case of a malfunction.

In order to achieve the expected outcomes, international cooperation is advised, in particular with projects or partners from the US, Japan, Canada, South Korea, Singapore, Australia.

This topic implements the co-programmed European Partnership on ‘Connected, Cooperative and Automated Mobility’ (CCAM).