The C-AVOID project focuses on Connected – Autonomous – Vehicles Orchestrated with Intelligent Decisions (C-AVOID) and aims at unveiling the safety potentials provided by the next-generation of cellular networks (5G) in the automotive sector.
Modern vehicles on-board have several new driver assistance mechanisms and, soon, they will be able to substitute humans in all basic driving operations. In the not-so-distant future, the social impact of Autonomous Vehicles will be quantified in the form of collision savings (driver errors are the main reason for 90% of the collisions), travel time reductions (thanks to higher exploitation of the road infrastructure), and fuel efficiency (through smoother accelerations and reduced braking). In this context, wireless communications among vehicles constitute a fundamental tool in achieving vehicle coordination and in extending the sensing capabilities of the vehicles of the future.
However, most advanced methods take for granted the wireless link, neglecting the communication commitment and the involved processing latency. What’s more, advanced algorithms rely on very precise assumptions, such as the perfect localization of vehicles in the road infrastructure. Exploiting 5G, C-AVOID aims at creating a network architecture that fills these gaps, moving a step forward towards a realistic and safer implementation of the road infrastructure of the future. Specifically, such architecture, in cooperation with the automation present in modern vehicles, is exploited to test in practice the feasibility of novel algorithms that:
• Reduce collisions among vehicles when human drivers are involved, thanks to the collection of historical vehicle data and the accurate modelling of typical driver maneuvers;
• Coordinate autonomous vehicles in dangerous road sections, accounting for possible sensor errors and inaccuracies.
The “C-AVOID” Marie Skłodowska Curie Actions (MSCA) project was awarded to Christian Vitale, a Research Associate at the KIOS Research and Innovation Center of Excellence at the University of Cyprus. The Fellow will work with Professor Georgios Ellinas and Research Assistant Professor Panayiotis Kolios.
Project’s website: https://www.kios.ucy.ac.cy/c-avoid/
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the grant agreement No 101003439 (‘C-AVOID’).
