News

In the latest open call for project ideas to contribute to new vehicle and traffic safety research projects, based on the multidisciplinary competence available within SAFER, no less than 4 pre-studies were approved by the board.

“It is great to see that our SAFER pre-study program has developed so well”, says Ines Heinig, responsible for the program in SAFER's secretariat. She continues:
“We have found a good tool to stimulate multidisciplinary collaboration and an effective way to start activities that leads to something more, for example a larger application or to explore a completely new area”. 

Changing point of view: Exploring the impact of embodied cognition on automated driving design
This pre-study aims to explore how the embodied cognition (EC) approach can provide additional and alternative solutions for increased traffic safety in semi-automated vehicles by means of interactive seminars which brings together theory (and theorists) and practice (and practitioners). Work carried out in aviation, for example, showed how changing the unit of analysis,  from the individual pilot to the whole system including the material and social environment of the entire cockpit, provides a new understanding and additional insights of the tasks and cognitive demands of a particular activity, such as landing an airplane. 
In this pre-study the project team suggests that EC can be defined into a theoretical framework for autonomous vehicles, including drivers, passengers, other road users, and infrastructure, a design tool, and tentatively an evaluation framework for the automotive domain. In practice, 4 seminars will we conducted and the knowledge about EC for the automotive will result in a white paper. Also, an application bridging the current gaps between theory/method/practice will be developed. The pre-study will also build a network for competence of benefit for Sweden. 

This project includes as many as seven partners; Skövde University (project lead), Folksam, Veoneer, Autoliv, VCC, Volvo Construction Equipment and Volvo Group. The pre-study will be placed in the Road user behaviour project portfolio.

Hövding data for risk estimation
With the help of data from Hövding helmets in traffic, the researchers intends to investigate the possibilities of predicting where, and when, accidents are likely to occur. By combining the data from accelerations and GPS information collected by connected Hövding helmets with other data sources such as weather, traffic and surface data, like friction or local topography, the team will also link the design of the infrastructure to the cyclists' accident risk estimation under various conditions.

The pre-study will show how Hövding as a safety system can contribute to the safe traffic environments of the future and also demonstrate how large amounts of data can be combined and made available through public databases. The project will be carried out by RISE and SAFER’s new partner Hövding. The project will be placed in the Safety performance evaluation research area.

Cooperative Automated Driving Use Cases for V2X Communication
Cooperative perception, also known as collective perception, realized by fusing the object data sensed by the on-board sensors with information received from the infrastructure sensors, has potential to bring together driving automation technology with V2X communication. However, cooperative perception is heavily dependent on the timeliness of the data received by a connected vehicle. Thus, one of the great challenges is to study how the latency affects the performance of the AD or ADAS functionalities in dealing with safety critical traffic cases. Such a study would enable to set the requirement on latency of V2X communication systems based on safety requirement of AD/ADAS functions. 

The research question the researchers want to address in this pre-study is: determine the latency requirements for collective perception systems to enable AD/ADAS function to fulfil the state-of-the-art safety norms in a realistic traffic use case. To approach this question, the team aims to establish a tool chain data-scenarios-simulation-requirements, understand the needed pieces/shortcomings of the data and tools, and apply for a larger project to continue building the framework. The pre-study will be concluded by Halmstad University (project leader), Viscando and Zenseact. Systems for accident prevention and AD will be the research area for this SAFER pre-study.

Report on the safety and traffic flow impact of mixed traffic condition
The development and application of automated driving technology has shown a great potential in improving traffic safety and traffic efficiency. However, since the technology is not yet mature, it can be foreseen that the situation of automated driving mixed with manual driving will last for a long time in the preliminary stage of automated driving. Therefore, VTI initiated the Heterogeneous project together Chalmers, Volvo AB and Volvo Cars to study the coupling relationship between different automated driving behaviours and manual driving behaviour. The project is under the scope of CTS - The China Sweden Research Centre for Traffic Safety. The aim of this study is to develop methods for evaluating the safety and traffic flow impact when autonomous vehicles mix with manually driven vehicles. 
The pre-study project intends to extend the work of the students and report the result in a scientific publication at the end of the pre-study project. This will create new knowledge on modeling and simulation of heterogenous traffic, which is one of the work packages in the project. The resulting paper is intended for submission to a well-known international conference; IEEE Intelligent Transportation Conference, and will report on simulation results presenting effects of autonomous vehicles on traffic flow and safety in a heterogeneous traffic setup.

This project will be placed in SAFER’s research area Safety performance evaluation and will be carried out by Chalmers and VTI.

Call for SAFER pre-studies now open
Do you have a traffic safety research idea that you would like to develop together with SAFER partners? We have an opportunity! Funding will proactively stimulate project generation with several SAFER partners involved to maximize the benefits of our multi-disciplinary platform and obtain a broad commitment, both between partners and within research areas. The funding is for getting started with strategic knowledge creation that can be leveraged e.g. by using the unique, new competence as a basis for national funding or an entry ticket to prestigious international collaborations. We also welcome proposals that are of a different nature, for instance for finalization of publications from a completed project or investigation of a new area. 

Simply put, projects that lead SAFER forward and contribute to the continued development of our joint collaboration platform. The time schedule for this calls is:

• March 23: Call for pre-studies open
• April 14: Research Area day – dialogue about ideas within the Reference groups – finding partners (recommended)
• Until May 2: Fill in the pre-study application and submit here: https://tinyurl.com/saferprestudy
• May 12: The Scientific Council (research area directors and part of the SAFER management team) evaluates and ranks all pre-study applications
• May 20: The SAFER Board decides about funding
• By end of May: Decision letters are sent out
• Projects to start before summer 2021

Link to complete information in Webforum here (if you need access, please contact ines.heinig@chalmers.se).

Welcome with your application!