2016-2017 Automated Road Transport

Call summary

Scene Setter

Road vehicle automation is one of the major trends that will shape the future of road transport and of our mobility. It holds the promise to help address many of the major challenges of today's transport system, such as user safety, energy efficiency, air quality and congestion, and to enhance the drivers' individual comfort and convenience. At the same time, it represents a critical testing ground for the ability of the European automotive industry to preserve and consolidate its global leadership. Automakers around the world are unanimous in predicting the emergence of systems for automated driving sometime in the near future.

Current technology will evolve further towards semi-automation and eventually towards full automation in real moving traffic. This evolution is very promising and may help to drastically reduce road fatalities to near zero, as more than 90% of road accidents are partly or fully due to human errors. Nevertheless, there are still many challenges related to technology, digital infrastructure, user and societal acceptance, driver behaviour, regulation and legislation, and business models, which need to be tackled to enable the deployment of automated driving on European roads.

The main contribution of this call will be to support the short term introduction of passenger cars automated driving level 3 (Conditional Automation - Full driving performed by an automated driving system with the expectation that the human driver will respond appropriately to a request to intervene in real traffic conditions)[[The SAE International's standard J3016 identifies six levels of driving automation from "no automation" to "full automation"]] including safe stops, and of truck platooning in real traffic conditions from 2020 onwards. The main focus of this call is on demonstrations of automated driving systems for passenger cars, trucks and urban transport. Demonstrations will be complemented by further research on digital infrastructure to ensure the necessary level of safety, reliability and efficiency of automated driving systems and by a comprehensive analysis of safety aspects in relation to mixed traffic conditions and their influence on end user acceptance. This call includes also an action to assess road infrastructure requirements for higher levels of vehicle automation and to coordinate and support all research and innovation activities on automated driving both at European and international levels.

Cooperative systems and connectivity, based on communication of real-time vehicle data, as important means to increase the performance of automated driving will also be addressed in other calls, such as Mobility for Growth (topic MG-6.2-2016 on 'Large-scale demonstration(s) of cooperative ITS'). There is considerable complementarity between the development and deployment of Intelligent Transport Systems and that of Automated Road Transport. ICT components e.g. sensors and microsystems and data fusion which are important elements of automated road transport will be addressed in the LEIT/ICT Work Programme, as well as in the ECSEL Joint Undertaking. The 'Internet of Things' call [Work Programme Part Cross-cutting activities (Focus Areas) – Annex 20] addresses a pilot on 'Autonomous vehicles in a connected environment' which focuses on technology research in a broader IoT context, including horizontal elements such as ethics and privacy, trust and security, validation, standards and interoperability, user acceptability and human factor, liability and sustainability. There is also complementarity with the LEIT/Space Work Programme part, in particular with the call 'Applications in Satellite Navigation – Galileo', topic 'Galileo-1-2017 – EGNSS Transport'.