Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - PRoPART (Precise and Robust Positioning for Automated Road Transports)

Teaser

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...

Summary

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 of the project is the development and demonstration of a high availability positioning solution for connected ADAS 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 decisions 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. PRoPART will also exploit possibilities to distribute EGNSS RTK correction data from the RSU to the vehicle. 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
o Performance indicators: Initialization and re-initialization time, vehicle position, velocity and attitude accuracy in specific use case environments.
-> 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. The project aims to achieve objects detected by an RSU to be aggregated by a vehicle (ECU) with an o

Work performed

The PRoPART Use Cases and System Requirements have been defined and the demonstration scenario has been planned. The public deliverable D1.1 (Report on Vehicle Application Use Cases and Application Scenarios) was delivered and made publicly available via the PRoPART website. Based on the Use Cases the Vehicle Application System Requirements was elicitated and structured. Based on the system requirements, the PRoPART subsystem requirements were defined including requirements on Communication, perception and positioning.
The PRoPART System Architecture has been defined including the vehicle and the roadside unit architectures. The system design of V2X Communication, Positioning system, UWB System, Sensor System and High Grade IMU have been finalized. Software and Hardware development has been started. The hardware development, including UWB Nodes, Road Side Unit, GNSS platorm and antennas, has been finalized. The software development is still ongoing and will continue in parallel with hardware component testing and subsystem integration. The truck platform to be used for demonstration has been selected and the demonstration scenarios have been chosen.

Final results

The progress beyond the current state of the art can be summarized as follows:

- Robust integrated multi-constellation, multi-frequency RTK navigation software

- V2X based cooperative object perception and data fusion

- Advanced cooperative Roadside Unit with enhanced localization support

- UWB ranging sensor nodes as redundancy system for robust positioning

Website & more info

More info: http://www.propart-project.eu.