Deadline: 19-Oct-21
European Commission is inviting proposals for projects to work on more powerful and reliable on-board perception and decision-making technologies addressing complex environmental conditions.
To achieve secure and trustworthy interaction between vehicles, infrastructure and road users, robust (e.g. weather resilient) and accurate on-board environment positioning and perception systems are essential for the extraction of reliable information required for real-time driving decision-making. Furthermore, advanced on-board decision-making functionalities need to handle the diversity of use cases in their respective operational domains.
Such functionalities have to guarantee the safety and reliability of future automated vehicles, which will integrate complex in-vehicle systems-of-systems with advanced sensors, control and actuators, relying on extensive computational power and an increased dependency on software for decision-making.
The proposed actions are expected to address the development and demonstration of each of the following aspects:
- More powerful and reliable embedded in-vehicle perception systems with increased performance, (weather) resilience and accuracy based on enhanced sensing, localization (with reliable, dynamic, high-definition digital maps, reliable and precise location from EU satellite navigation services) and improved object/person classification and cognition (with greater integration with infrastructure-based perception systems and other vehicles to complete data fusion and real time updates).
- System self-assessment methods for environment perception technologies and improved hardware integration into the vehicle need also to avoid reliability issues due to environmental stresses, temperature shifts, vibrations, potential malicious attacks, low speed crashes, etc.
- On-board, real-time, fail-safe, unambiguous and traceable decision-making systems for safe Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) based on complex in-vehicle systems-of-systems requiring extensive computational power and highly advanced algorithms in order to address complex traffic scenarios (with VRU). These systems should be cost effective and respecting the protection of personal data with improved minimum risk manoeuvres in the event that the limit of the ODD is reached or in the case of a malfunction.
Funding Information
The check will normally be done for the coordinator if the requested grant amount is equal to or greater than EUR 500 000, except for:
- public bodies (entities established as a public body under national law, including local, regional or national authorities) or international organisations; and
- cases where the individual requested grant amount is not more than EUR 60 000 (lowvalue grant).
Expected Outcomes
Project results are expected to contribute to all of the following expected outcomes:
- Determination of the appropriate compositions of cost-efficient sensor suites that most effectively and reliably deliver the lateral, spatial and temporal resolution needed for real-time driving decision-making of Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs).
- Ability to perform advanced environment and traffic recognition and prediction, limiting false detections and non-detections of obstacles, with particular attention to Vulnerable Road Users (VRU), in order to reduce existing disparities in the harm-to-exposure ratios of these vulnerable groups.
- Ability to determine the appropriate course of action of a CAV in a real world environment with a wide range of traffic scenarios and identify use cases in which the vehicle’s decision-making might be contradictory to existing traffic rules (e.g. to make way for a priority vehicle, to obey police officers directing traffic).
- Availability of robust, transparent and accurate systems to enable the safe and reliable operation of automated vehicles in expanding Operational Design Domains (ODDs) including all weather conditions, complex urban environments, challenges in rural environments, etc.
- Standardization mandate for performance requirements for environment perception systems with respect to different automation levels and ODDs.
Eligibility Criteria
To be eligible for funding, applicants must be established in one of the eligible countries, i.e.:
- the Member States of the European Union, including their outermost regions;
- the Overseas Countries and Territories (OCTs) linked to the Member States;
- eligible non-EU countries:
- countries associated to Horizon Europe;
- low- and middle-income countries .
For more information, visit https://bit.ly/37wJhgU