Automated vehicles and advanced driver assistance systems contribute towards “Vision Zero”, i.e. a future where no humans are killed or impaired by accidents. Predictions indicate that these technologies will also contribute to reduced traffic density through increased road efficiency and will create new business models for mobility. High accuracy and robust positioning is a required key technology in both advanced driver assistance systems and connected autonomous vehicle applications. Today, there are several types of sensors used in autonomous vehicles such as cameras, laser scanners, ultrasonic, radar etc. The connected and automated vehicle applications currently under development are based on the cooperation between different solutions to determine the absolute position of the vehicle on the road and relative to any obstacles. No single technology can solve this in all situations, and when combining different technologies it is vital to understand the integrity of the available information. PRoPART will demonstrate the developed positioning solution in a truck driving in motorway conditions.
The overall objective in PRoPART is the development and demonstration of a high availability positioning solution for connected AD applications. It aims to develop and enhance an existing RTK (Real Time Kinematic) software solution developed by Waysure by exploiting the distinguished features of Galileo signals as well as combining it with other positioning and sensor technologies. Also, the possibility to authenticate the navigation message of Galileo and other navigation satellite systems through Open Service – Navigation Message Authentication (OS-NMA), adding resistance to certain spoofing attacks, will be explored during the project. Besides the use of vehicle on board sensors, PRoPART will also use a low-cost Ultra-Wideband (UWB) ranging solution for redundancy and robustness in areas where the coverage of GNSS is poor (e.g. in tunnels or in urban canyons). In order to define the correct requirements for the PRoPART combined positioning solution, a cooperative automated vehicle application will be defined and developed. The vehicle application will rely on the high availability positioning solution and use it to couple its ADAS system with V2X and aggregate information received from other connected vehicles and Road Side Units (RSU). As there will be a transition period where a lot of vehicles are neither connected nor automated, solutions having high impact during low penetration are in focus. Therefore, PRoPART will implement an RSU with high-precision positioning and use both UWB as well as traffic monitoring to supply ranging, object perception and EGNSS RTK correction data via ETSI ITS-G5 to the connected vehicle so that a safe decision based on robust data can be made. This means that PRoPART also will implement perception layer sensor fusion that uses information collected from external sensors as well as information from both the on-board vehicle sensors and the high availability positioning solution.
The main objectives and their related impacts can be summarized as follows:
Precise positioning with EGNSS:
o Deeply Coupled RTK Positioning using the Galileo E1 and E5 signals for carrier based positioning as well as the GPS L1, L2 and L5 signals
o Increased robustness with EGNSS using E1 and E5 signals
High Availability and Robust Positioning:
o Combining EGNSS RTK positioning with UWB ranging and vehicle motion sensors providing deeply coupled feedback
o EGNSS RTK correction data from RSU
o RSU with traffic monitoring capabilities
Cooperative Automated Vehicle Application:
o Increased cooperation between automated and non-automated vehicles
o Safer decisions for traffic manoeuvres
o More cost efficient high precision positioning
Within this project, these ambitious goals will be demonstrated for an automated collaborative lane change function using the AstaZero proving ground.
