A car with a sixth sense

Cooperative sensor technology for highly automated driving

To reduce the number of traffic accidents and their level of severity – that’s the goal of the Research Initiative for Cooperative Vehicle Safety (Ko-FAS). The 15 million euro initiative, sponsored by the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology, has developed four cutting- edge technologies, components and systems to this end over the past four years. Each provides road users with a comprehensive view of their surroundings using cooperative sensor and perception technology. On this basis, it is possible to anticipate critical traffic situations in order to take the appropriate precautionary measures and avoid accidents or reduce their level of severity. The Steinbeis Innovation Center for Embedded Design and Networking offered its expertise as a partner in the Cooperative Transponder Technology sub-project (Ko-TAG).

The developed technologies track interactions between sensors of various road users and use the latest methods of communications technology to exchange information. The project partners from business and scientific circles compiled tremendous amounts of data on cooperative systems to be used for safety in road traffic. With this initiative, the Ko- FAS has highlighted the impressive innovative flair and technological leadership not only of the German automotive industry but also of its research partners.

For the sub-project, Ko-TAG, the Steinbeis experts focused their research on sensor technology based on transponder systems, or miniaturized transmitter and receiver units. The technology is being examined for its potential to protect vulnerable road users and enhance car-to-car safety. The networked project relies on location devices in the vehicle. These retrieve information from other transponders carried by other road users. The transponders respond to prompts from the location devices with specific data. Using this, the location device then pinpoints the relative positions and types of road users in the immediate environment and calculates collision risks.

The Steinbeis Innovation Center for Embedded Design and Networking, which is headed up by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Axel Sikora (Offenburg University of Applied Sciences), was closely involved in the concept, the system design and the programming of communication protocols for the new transponders. Their work resulted in the development of a sub-system for the IEEE802.11p protocol from the field of car-to-car communication. Next to integration into the car-to-car communication, it enables additional features such as fast data transfer and relative localization based on time of flight (ToF) and angle of arrival (AoA) measurements. The sub-system was successfully verified not only in a network simulator, but also in a dedicated emulator with actual hardware developed during the project. Then, countless field tests successfully confirmed the performance of the selected system. The Steinbeis experts were also responsible for the development and delivery of a data security concept. Once the Ko-FAS initiative comes to an end in 2013, further development will be carried out on the applications to integrate them into vehicle systems. Plans for adopting this scalable localization system for other areas, such as automation technology or patient monitoring, are also in the works.

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