ESPLANADE creates a common safety methodology for the introduction of automated vehicles
Automated vehicles will likely increase road safety since the human mistakes, which is a common cause of accidents, can be reduced. But to make autonomous vehicles a reality, safety for the new technology must be guaranteed.
Before the traffic environment is ready for self-driving vehicles in all situations, we need to gradually introduce them into traffic and create trust among all actors in the society. Therefore, in the new SAFER-associated project ESPLANADE (Efficient and Safe Product Lines of Architectures eNabling Autonomous DrivE), the Swedish automotive industry collaborates with academia and specialists to create a common safety methodology.
Who is in charge?
One of the key issues in the project is how the communication between the car and the driver will be set up, for example, by clarifying who is responsible for conveying the vehicle in different situations.
The tasks that autonomous vehicles need to solve is considerably more complex than those that manual vehicles have to handle. This makes it much more difficult to demonstrate that the self-driving vehicles become safe in all situations they will face.
The ambition of ESPLANADE is to pursue research in a highly critical and internationally acclaimed area. The ESPLANDE project aims at providing a methodology that can be applied to increasingly complex tasks in order to ensure a safe introduction of more and more advance self-driving vehicles. The developed methodology will take autonomous vehicles an important step closer to everyday traffic.
Several SAFER partners involved
ESPLANADE, which will be an important contribution to the project portfolio within the Research area Systems for accident prevention, is part-financed by Sweden's Innovation Authority VINNOVA. The project runs for three years, 2017-2019. The project's total budget is SEK 31 million. Project leader for the project is RISE (formerly SP, Swedish Technical Research Institute). Other SAFER participants are Volvo Cars, Volvo GTT, Autoliv and KTH. Also Semcon, Systemite, Qamcom, Comentor and Delphi participate in the project.
