Smart mobility is a key grand challenge across the globe, seen as being essential to ensuring sustainable and safe transportation for the world’s population. The drive towards improving sustainability also extends to industries, where smart transport modalities contribute to increasing operational efficiency and decreasing emissions. EU reports estimate that over 90% of road accidents occur due to human-error, for instance, due to erroneous perception, incorrect decision making, distraction, or otherwise. Further, the inability of human drivers to perceive and account for road and environmental factors beyond their line of sight results in inefficient vehicular operation (wasted energy due to frequent stop and go, inefficient path planning, traffic imbalances and congestion).
The essential building blocks for Level 3+ ADFs are now emerging from early ideation stages (TRL1-2), and in the recent past, the field of automated transportation has seen highly publicized developments, often involving experimental vehicles, and unique technology prototypes. However, successfully addressing the grand challenge of safe, efficient, and smart mobility at the global scale requires R&D efforts to be focused on translating novel concepts into commercially viable, mass deployable technologies at TRL 3-5, that can be certified as functionally safe. Importantly, as the concept of automation spreads to other transportation modalities – passenger vehicles, commercial vehicles, industrial vehicles, drones, aircraft – the essential building blocks too will have to evolve towards multi-domain application, satisfying varying constraints and complexity without compromising on safety.
Springing from the aforementioned motivation, the mail goal of NewControl is to:
Deliver fail-operational holistic virtualized platforms for vehicular subsystems that are critical to automated driving (SAE Levels 3+), enabling mobility-as-a-service for next generation highly automated vehicles.
The NewControl project's strategy to achieve its main target consists of four key technical objectives. While these four technical objectives address different levels (components, control systems, architectures and function) of the automation chain, the non-technical objectives address market/social/technological impacts and “European Values”.
Objective 1: Increase the accuracy and robustness of algorithms, E/E architectures for adaptive perception
Objective 2: Increase performance, power, reliability, and reduce cost of the on-board computing platforms used for perception, cognition and control
Objective 3: Achieve certifiability of adaptive algorithms for safety-critical control functions
Objective 4: Develop a generalized hardware abstraction layer for efficient, adaptive fail-operational control of propulsion systems across vehicular platforms
Objective 5: Competitive advantage to European industry
Objective 6: Increase user acceptance of automated control functions
