New film highlights "research to reality" testing capabilities of innovITS ADVANCE
25th April 2012 03:35:17 pm, added by admin
Link: http://youtu.be/qxYYk0RMY84
A video presentation – produced for innovITS by intelligent transport publisher H3B Media – provides for the first time an accessible audio-visual overview of the impressive capabilities and wide-ranging applications of the world-leading innovITS Advance test facility, which is based in the UK midlands.
The short film was shown for the first time during the Intelligent Mobility summit, hosted today in London by the UK Automotive Council. Entitled ‘innovITS Advance - From Research to Reality’ the four minute video describes the many sophisticated systems and technologies installed at innovITS Advance, which together provide a world-first testing capability for advanced transportations innovations. The film will be presented at other exhibitions and leading trade events, and is also available online on the innovITS ADVANCE YouTube Channel.
“We are particularly proud to have been able to produce this short film to share the comprehensive nature of the secure and fully controllable testing environment provided by innovITS Advance – you have to see it to believe it”, said innovITS CEO Phil Pettitt. “The 4km network of urban highways is instrumented with fully controllable systems ranging from our own private GSM, mesh and WiFi networks which, with GNSS interruption and denial systems, provide a plug and play environment that is configurable to represent almost any urban traffic situation worldwide: providing a pathway from research to reality for intelligent transport innovation.
“The facility provides a much-needed capability that will enable the automotive, telecommunications and electronics industries and highway administrations, to pull forward many new innovations that will help to shape a safer, more efficient and more environmentally sustainable future for urban transportation. This short film is intended to introduce the capabilities of innovITS Advance to a wider group of interested professionals as well as to the public at large.”
Download the press release
New capability unveiled for automatic pedestrian detection system development and certification
17th April 2012 01:11:48 pm, added by admin
A technology collaboration between innovITS ADVANCE and TRL has led to the creation of an advanced form of pedestrian detection target which will help those specifying and developing automotive safety systems based on pedestrian recognition to test and certify their products in a more flexible, accurate and repeatable manner.
“Pedestrian detection systems are already increasingly being incorporated into new vehicles,” said innovITS ADVANCE business development manager Steven Warner, “but the automotive industry is largely lacking in dummy systems providing a realistic representation of human form and gait to the vehicle’s on-board sensor systems. In working with TRL to develop the new pedestrian detection certification and development capability for users of innovITS ADVANCE, we sought to combine TRL’s strong background in automotive and highway safety with the accurate vehicle positioning technology incorporated within the innovITS ADVANCE site.”
The new TRL-innovITS ADVANCE mobile pedestrian target is based around a robust, free standing dummy that provides a realistic human aspect and moves under remote control with a programmable range of speed and acceleration settings. The dummy emulates the leg motion associated with a normal walking or running gait and can currently be configured for three body sizes: a 50th percentile adult male and adult female, and a 6 year old child. Each of these body options is fully detachable and designed to minimize vehicle damage should the pedestrian detection system fail to operate, and the unit moves on an extremely low profile base unit which is invisible to vehicle systems. When combined with the unique ground truth positioning system installed at innovITS ADVANCE, the new pedestrian detection target system provides a fast, highly accurate and repeatable testing capability for this important category of automotive safety system.
“TRL has a strong history in the field of vehicle safety and understands the real world accident scenarios that are most relevant to protect against,” said Richard Cuerden, TRL technical director, vehicle safety. “By collaborating with innovITS ADVANCE we have been able to create a packaged solution that is likely to be highly attractive to those researching and developing pedestrian detection technologies, innovations and products. This is likely to range from tier 1 organizations and automakers developing and implementing new systems, to highways authorities wishing to validate new innovations in highway design.”
ERTICO and ETSI to conduct eCall plugtests at innovITS ADVANCE
12th April 2012 04:36:10 pm, added by admin
eCall Plugtests
ERTICO and ETSI are joining efforts to organize the first eCall Plugtests event at the innovITS ADVANCE testing facility, at Nuneaton, UK from the 21st to the 25th May 2012.
This interoperability event will offer participants to check their implementation during test sessions in a dedicated GSM standalone network provided by InnovITS ADVANCE.
About eCall
eCall is a European Commision initiative to save life and reduce the social burden of road accidents. eCall is an112 emergency call, triggered by the vehicle occupants or automatically, which transmits a minimum set of data (MSD) and establish a voice connection with a public safety answering point (PSAP).
See: http://icarsupport.eu/ecall/
Interoperability and eCall service harmonization are critical challenges to be taken into account for successful deployment and operation of the eCall service.
Read this interesting article about ITS interoperability on the ERTICO website.
See the original article on the ETSI website.
TNO tests Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control vehicles at innovITS ADVANCE
14th March 2012 02:56:50 pm, added by admin
Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) technology offers the prospect of a practical solution to increase road space utilization based on ad hoc, real-time cooperative driving allowing inter-vehicle distances to be safely reduced while improving the experience for drivers.
The Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research, TNO, is in the process of developing its own low cost and highly practical CACC technology. This is being demonstrated in a test fleet of Toyota Prius cars in which factory-fitted long-range radar is used together with wireless vehicle to vehicle communications (802.11p and ETSI Geonet) and GPS based location, to enable CACC. Control of each of the CACC equipped vehicles is achieved through interaction with the CAN bus in order to manage acceleration and deceleration directly through the hybrid powertrain’s own control system. The CACC control strategy aims to optimize the collective behaviour of participating vehicles in order to safely allow significant reductions in inter-vehicle spacing while providing a comfortable experience for drivers. This includes, for example, the avoidance of oscillations of the ad-hoc platoon and the management of issues of signal degradation and of merging in and out at junctions.
In order to test and demonstrate this advanced system and consider the potential for its further development, three of TNO’s Prius vehicles equipped with CACC were evaluated at innovITS ADVANCE in early March 2012. “We were pleased to be able to host these CACC tests,” commented innovITS ADVANCE business development manager Steven Warner. “With our private communications networks including GSM and WiFi systems and SkyClone GNSS system, we can model almost any urban scenario of signal attenuation, interruption or denial of service. As such innovITS ADVANCE is the ideal environment for the testing and development of this type of advanced cooperative vehicle technology.”
innovITS ADVANCE announces testing capability to help combat GNSS ‘spoofing’
28th February 2012 11:50:19 am, added by admin
The dangers of the malicious jamming of global navigational satellite signals (GNSS) – including their targeted substitution with fraudulent data – is currently the subject of heated debate in the media, academia and international communications industries. To help mitigate, control and eliminate such risks in the future, innovITS ADVANCE is offering a new service enabling developers of automotive intelligent transport systems (ITS) technologies to submit their products to simulated attacks and hence provide the basis for the development of in-built system robustness
Since its launch in 2011, the innovITS ADVANCE test facility has been equipped with the NSL ‘Skyclone’ system that enables users to replicate precisely the effects of GNSS degradation and denial of service: for example, high rise buildings and their associated ‘urban canyons’. So while innovITS ADVANCE has the visible appearance of a network of urban roads surrounded by grassed level ground, for the vehicles under test the conditions of GNSS denial can be made to precisely replicate anything from a high-rise environment, similar to New York’s Lower Manhattan or London’s Docklands, to a low-rise industrial estate or suburban sprawl punctuated by the occasional open space. With the new service now being offered by innovITS ADVANCE, this same infrastructure, in addition to the centre’s highly controllable private GSM and WiFi networks, will be used to address the needs of system robustness development against a wide range of malicious threats.
“GPS signals are now very much a part of almost every aspect of day-to-day life,” said innovITS ADVANCE business development manager Steven Warner. “In addition to their use in automotive navigation through the ubiquitous sat nav, its timing signals are used extensively for everything from telecommunications to financial transactions – all of which makes it vulnerable to malicious attack from an extremely wide range of sources. The communications industry is rapidly developing counter-measures to combat current and potential threats, but until now it has lacked the ability to physically test the robustness of new products subjected to denial or malicious corruption of signals.”
Using the new service offered by innovITS ADVANCE the centre’s automotive and telecoms customers will be able to simulate almost any form of GNSS corruption using the SkyClone system. In addition to this, they can assess the combination of these scenarios with parallel interruption and corruption of GSM and WiFi signals using the centre’s private telecoms networks which can be controlled at an individual mast and beacon level.
“This new service provides a much needed capability to combat the very real threats of denial and corruption of navigational signals, enabling developers to build in robustness to their new ITS products innovations from the very outset,” continues Warner. “As such, this service will be a significant enabler for the realisation of safe and effective vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to- infrastructure technologies aimed at improving both the safety and efficiency of transportation.”
