News

The first operational year in SAFER stage 5, where 35 partners collaborate on life-saving vehicle and traffic safety research, has been short, only nine months. Nevertheless, many results have been delivered. The report is a summary of the activities and research carried out within the competence center between April 1 – December 31, 2019.

“We have started our fifth stage in a very positive way. We see a great commitment and willingness to contribute to our joint research agenda from our partners”, says Magnus Granström, SAFER’s director.

35 committed partners contribute
The development of knowledge in traffic safety is essential, and by applying collaborative research and knowledge exchange the SAFER partners create visible and measurable results in practice. The partners access – and contributes to – a unique competence and research infrastructure. During SAFER’s 14^th operational year, in total 35 partners representing stakeholders within the automotive industry, the academia and the authorities were part of SAFER. We bring people together to create research and knowledge that saves lives, prevent injuries and enable safe mobility for people and goods.

Magnus Granström tells:
“Our vision is that all road users travel safely in the road transport system”.

Safe automated driving in focus
The challenge of putting self-driving vehicles on the roads is enormous. Automation affects everyone and the potential social benefits are huge, partly through increased traffic safety, but also increased efficiency. During the past year we have been working to strengthen the expertise in this research area, meeting the challenges ahead of us regarding safety aspects of vehicles, road users and infrastructure when we are moving towards higher degrees of automation, in most cases in a mixed environment. Also, the scientific base for verification and validation is of utmost importance in order to ascertain that correct methods are used in an area that is much more complex than previously. This base is also required to create a foundation for future standardization of test methodologies.

A newly established competence network, Automotive safety assurance, led by Dr. Fredrik Sandblom, Volvo Group, has kept together a valuable discussion about methods and nomenclature for how to show that autonomous vehicles are tolerably safe. The network has been the “place to go” for SAFER partners to discuss how to make safe automated vehicles and to show that they are.

How do we support a safe road user behaviour?
How do people behave in traffic and how can they be stimulated to a safe behaviour? In an era where traffic complexity is increasing as quickly as the technology is evolving, answering this question becomes vital. Taking a broad multi-disciplinary approach, the research area Road User Behaviour at SAFER focuses on developing scientific methods and attractive solutions that facilitate safe behaviour in traffic.

The DRAMA project addresses knowledge building around activity identification of drivers and passengers in vehicles to improve interaction between them and the vehicle. Mapping and detecting activities at drivers and passengers are important for both user experience and traffic safety. With knowledge about activities, the HMI can be adjusted to the currently most efficient modality. Also, development and evaluation of novel interaction principles, including nudging (MeBeSafe) has been a focused area. In the project ADAS&ME methods to diagnose driver fitness based on monitoring data has been developed.

Electric Personal Mobility Vehicles (e-PMVs) have recently become very common in many cities around the world and their popularity is growing every day. However, as e-PMVs become increasingly prevalent, crashes occurring while using these vehicles are also increasing in number.

“Currently, it is largely unknown what mechanisms are causing the e-PMVs crashes and what is public opinion on the safety concerns and ease-of-use of e-PMVs. For this reason, the project portfolio has also been enriched by two projects addressing safety of new electric vehicles for personal mobility; Characterizing and classifying new ePMVs and SAFE-ePMVs.”, Magnus tells.

We have also started up yet another competence network on human behaviour. Combining knowledge from different disciplines, this competence network aspires to be a forum to discuss methodologies and challenges for the research on human behaviour, with the final aim to improve the safety of the road transportation system. The competence network leader for human behaviour is Dr. Giulio Bianchi Piccinini, Chalmers.

World leading human body model functionality
Within human body modelling (HBM), SAFER provides a competence platform for SAFER partners as well as a natural contact point for external cooperation. The growing activity in human body modelling has already placed SAFER among the most well-known organisations globally, and the interest shown by other universities proves its high academic relevance. SAFER’s HBM vision encompasses a scalable, tuneable, human body model with omni-directional injury prediction capabilities, including high-g and low-g events. This means a virtual human substitute that can be used for predicting injury outcome in any impact situation/direction, able to replicate a large population of people (standing as well as sitting) with humanlike kinematics in impacts as well as maneuver events. The human body models, including the knowledge obtained in the pre-competitive joint research, are used by the industry in development of safety functions.

During 2019, progress has been made in all the aspects of the SAFER HBM development, keeping several PhD students busy. Publications on validation of steering maneuver performance, the unique tissue-based criteria for rib fracture evaluation, in addition to first stage validation of morphed models are examples that have been presented during this year.

Major upgrade of databases with naturalistic driving data
In 2019 SAFER was granted research funding for a major investment in developing its large databases with naturalistic driving data. The project FOT-E, Field Operational Test dataset Enrichment for the development of safety and highly autonomous vehicle functions, aims to accelerate the development of automated vehicles and ensure that these are safe once they reach the market.

“When the upgrade is completed, we will be able to use the database to a much higher degree than today, for example to validate safety systems in future vehicles that keeps track of the driver’s attention and drowsiness”, Magnus says.

21 projects finalised
The project portfolio is the base for the SAFER collaboration, comprising of different types of project, but all focusing on one or more of the issues addressed in the roadmaps and other strategy documents, created through the multidisciplinary research. The project portfolio is created, maintained and developed through the joint efforts in the research areas and among the partners and throughout the year the focus has been to secure a solid foundation of projects and related activities through various sources of funding. 12 new projects have been added to the portfolio and 21 has been finalized. In total, 52 projects have been ongoing during the year. You can find more information about the project portfolio here: https://www.saferresearch.com/projects

Knowledge building
Part of SAFERs mission is to disseminate results and knowledge to the partners and be a well renowned international centre of excellence. To achieve this SAFER regularly arrange activities for knowledge sharing. Workshops for the stakeholders to gather around a certain topic, share knowledge and get inspiration as a base for new common projects have also been conducted regularly.  All in all, 49 knowledge sharing activities has been accomplished.