COVEL
Cooperative Vehicle Localization for Safe and Sustainable Mobility
Background & Objectives
Position
Lane-level vehicle positioning is a crucial requirement of a co-operative road safety system.
For almost every positioning system, a GNSS like GPS is the backbone. Usually the satellite signals are integrated with a vehicle’s odometer to improve the performance of the system, and the vehicle position is then determined in real time using the map-matching function.
Communication
There is consensus within the ITS community that vehicular communications will improve road safety and traffic management efficiency. In particular, VANET is considered as a key technology for improving preventive and active road safety e.g. collision avoidance. Meanwhile, different challenges must be considered and resolved for a successful introduction of V2X systems to the market, including technical challenges, standardisations, deployment plans, etc.
Traffic management
The most accurate information available is generally at the road level; direction is mostly unknown except where there are two carriageways with equipment located at pre-determined places. Information is sent by a traffic control centre using VMS or via wide-band broadcasting or in few cases to the on-board units.
Description
The work needed to reach the COVEL's results has been divided in the following auto explicative work packages:
- State of the art
- Use case definition
- Lane level user needs
- Functional requirements
- Overall System specification and Architecture
- Road side unit specification
- On-board unit specification
- Traffic management system specification
- Communication component
- Positioning component
- Cooperative Map Matching
- Lane-Level Navigation
- Lane-level map data acquisition
- Road Side Unit Prototype
- On-board unit prototype
- Lane-level traffic management system prototype
- Test and validation
- Deployment, Exploitation and Dissemination
Test and validation of results produced by COVEL will be realized in a real test site. It'll be shown how the three main COVEL's actors OnBoardUnit, RoadSiteUnit and TrafficControlCentre will interact to improve safety, to increase navigation efficiency , to reduce time travel and pollution.
Objectives
The aim of the COVEL project is to develop a Lane Navigation Assistant (LNA) – an in-vehicle system thatwill enable lane-level positioning, lane-level navigation and lane-level traffic management, especially in urban areas. The LNA will use satellite positioning as its primary source, and this data will be augmented by corrected positioning information from the EGNOS system. The EGNOS data will be obtained directly from EGNOS’ satellites or from EDAS and broadcast to vehicles using vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication, for which standards are under development. Furthermore, the satellite positioning will be enhanced by innovative algorithms for co-operative localisation and map matching. The resulting lane-level vehicle positioning will bring navigation and traffic management to a new level of detail and effectiveness.
Work performed & results
The expected results of COVEL are:
- improving the positioning accuracy and signal availability in urban areas compared to the current state-of-the-art;
- improving EGNOS availability and the final position accuracy when the EGNOS satellites are not visible, thus reducing communication costs. The objective is obtained through the integration of EGNOS correction data (provided by EDAS) into V2X communication;
- developing a lane-level navigation application with the potential for use in mass-market navigation devices;
- designing the system architecture of a navigation system that is able to integrate and use the lane-level navigation potential and real-time traffic information.
