Mobility of the Future

Our work is focusing on mobility networks. With a long history in vehicle-2-x and 5G/6G communication technologies—our researchers at DCAITI develop solutions for automated driving, integrated urban mobility, implements advanced driver assistant systems and supports partners to validate automotive communications systems, to do traffic impact analysis and field testing.

Connected and Safe Cities

In recent years, revolutionary developments and trends could be monitored in the automotive domain. Connected cars and automated driving, collaborative mobility are just a few of these topics. Embedding vehicles into a greater mobility network by established communication links between vehicles and other vehicles, but also between traffic management centres, traffic lights, other means of transport, pedestrians, pollution sensors etc. is one of the key approaches here.

Todays demands on safety and comfort in and around the car cannot be met with in-car electronics alone. To achieve the zero accidents vision proposed by European Union, new approaches in road safetey measures must be considered. One of this approach is leveraging communication between vehicles and between vehicles and the road infrastructure for an extended sensing of information to avoid or mitigate accidents.

Automated and Cooperative Mobility

This also includes direct communication technologies like ITS-G5 and LTE-V2X. However, utilizing modern 5G and future 6G mobile networks allows us to include vulnerable road users, such as pedestrians, bicyclists, and scooters into the connected mobility world.

The cooperative driving group of DCAITI aims to adapt cooperation into novel driver assistance systems, by combining experience from fields of research and development. Communication offers novel insights to driver assistance, that no other sensor can provide: a look “inside” other vehicles. As such it is possible to share knowledge, intentions and maps between vehicles. These local dynamic maps enable vehicles to “see around the corner” or even beyond sensor range with multi-hop communication. Intelligent integration of cellular communication allows to share aggregated knowledge even further.

Automated and autonomous vehicles can go one step further: by communicating these vehicles can negotiate and conduct cooperative driving maneuvers. Constraints such as low-penetration rates, reliability, security and trust in wireless communication are key factors for feasibility of these functions. The investigation and prototyping of such novel applications is in the focus of the cooperative driver assistance systems group.

High-definition Digital Maps

High-precision digital maps are a key requirement for all current high-automated and autonomous vehicles. These maps are created initially as 3D high resolution scan and provide landmarks for localization and attributes for driving behavior, but roads and road properties change over time! By combining the distributed knowledge of the highly automated vehicles driving on these roads, a cooperative adaptive map service can be created by combining precision and timeliness of information.