A comprehensive look into proactive safety: solutions for a highly automated and mixed traffic environment
Last October, during the ITS World Congress in Hamburg, four partners from the SAFE-UP consortium had the opportunity to participate in a panel session alongside European Commission representative Claire Depré.
Moderated by consortium member Ignacio Magallón (Bax & Company), the session revolved around innovative proactive safety in a highly automated and mixed traffic environment. The speakers emphasised the need to define a new approach to ensure that we can tap into the safety benefits promised by Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs), allowing us to stay on track towards Vision Zero - zero deaths on all EU roads by 2050.
Claire Depré, Head of the Road Safety Unit at DG-MOVE, provided an overview of where the EU stands on its mission to Vision Zero. Progress in reducing fatality rates has stagnated in recent years and the EU missed its self-imposed target to halve the number of road deaths between 2010 and 2020. That’s why SAFE-UP’s research is so key. In addition to this overview, Claire introduced the eight new monitoring KPIs included in the last EU Road Safety Policy Framework 2021-2030, related to vehicle safety, infrastructure safety, speed, and more.
SAFE-UP coordinator Núria Parera (Applus+ IDIADA) revealed the testing and validation challenges for future safety-critical scenarios in the CCAM scheme – like the need for quality data on accidents and naturalistic driving to develop proper human driving models and the transition to a hybrid scheme combining physical and virtual testing. She also highlighted the importance of user acceptance, which is why testing with volunteers is essential for new AV and HMI systems.
Similarly, Arturo Tejada (TNO) explored the issues of “social driving” and how we could potentially make AVs behave more human-like. Although CAVs have a bright future, their adoption process and limited social driving skills may lead to new Safety-Critical situations. With that in mind, he presented how the future vehicle type approval should be.
Stella Nikolaou (CERTH-HIT) emphasised connectivity as a major enabler for the safe and collaborative co-existence of all traffic participants in CCAM mixed-traffic scenarios. More specifically, she touched upon the main challenges like latency, position accuracy, pedestrian connectivity, and human factors.
We very much look forward to continuing the discussions in the future!
If you have any questions for the participants, feel free to get in touch: contact@safe-up.eu
