ACCURATE

During the last five years, Autonomous Driving (AD) has moved from “maybe possible” to “now commercially available”. Every significant automaker is pursuing the technology, eager to rebuild itself and not to lose the opportunity of the new autonomous market.  

In recent years, driverless technology has progressed from needing driver assistance to having full autonomy. Driverless cars are looking more likely to become a reality. With this come significant benefits, including increased personal safety, time saved for drivers, mobility for nondrivers, decreased environmental harm, and reduced transportation costs. 

Overall, driverless technology is expected to add more than €7 trillion to the global economy by 2050 and to save hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few decades. Simultaneously, it will cause wholesale upheaval in the automotive industry by increasing efficiency in the logistics chain. 

In this framework, the ACCURATE project represents the next generation positioning on board unit that enables highly automated driving.

The objective of the ACCURATE project is to maximise the Operational Design Domain to go beyond the current limiting factors, such as weather and/or road conditions. 

The project intends to develop a high-precision positioning automotive system for enabling the development and deployment of complex automated driving functions. 

Also, within this context, ACCURATE has tested the inclusion of GNSS technologies in L4 and L5 validation and certification pipelines. 

Challenges and technical solution

Enhancing situational awareness by combining high-precision positioning approach with camera, lidar, and radar perception systems posed key challenges. 

In fact, the challenges that roads provide are numerous, such as pedestrians, uneven roads, variable surface materials, and changing weather conditions or blockage of GNSS signals. Thus, the key to automated functionalities lies principally within the vehicles’ sensor suite which comprises a combination (determined by the vehicle manufacturers) of radar, camera, lidar, inertial systems, and GNSS, with GNSS being the only data source to provide absolute position, velocity, and time.