Inherently Safe Mobility

Highly automated driving, AI for LiDAR - RaDAR - Vision sensing, automotive WIFI and 5G cellular connectivity, and cooperative control technology research.

Tomorrow’s car is a computer full of high-tech electronics. Today’s new car already has more than sixty processors devoted to making the vehicle safer and more fuel-efficient. All these high-tech systems have to work together in an integrated way so that future mobility will be not only greener, quieter and more fuel-efficient but also comfortable and attractive at the same time.

 

5G cellular connectivity

The TU/e campus acts as a mobility living lab in several European projects, like Autopilot and C-Mobile. IoT enabled automated driving, accurate positioning by sensor and HD map research and 5G cellular communication technologies are enablers for mobility use cases like automated parking, automated driving and car sharing systems.

For the realization of this automated services very accurate positioning is needed, as well as high definition maps. 5G will enable better location positioning fused with other sensor information in the car, as well will enable low latency for safety critical maneuvering and high bandwidth for HD maps. These HD maps are crucial when it comes to self-driving vehicles, because the combination of an accurate localization technology (5G small cells, super GPS, etc.) and HD maps will be both a safety fall back system and a vehicle navigation tool. The current main challenge with HD maps is requirement for high bandwidth and low latency data transfer to and from the car, as the latter needs to make quasi real time decisions. 

To allow highly precise localization and provide the required data rates for HD map delivery, a 5G private network is being deployed on the TU/e campus. Employing 5G new radio in combination with an agile optical front-/backhaul network, the TU/e 5G deployment will showcase advanced 5G functionality as a key enabler for smarter and automated mobility.

One of the running 5G projects is BLUESPACE, a new three-year European research project, led by TU/e. The goal is to develop next-generation wireless technologies that are demanded by the market now. We need to vastly improve the performance of the global 5G infrastructure that is currently being planned.
BLUESPACE intends to contribute technologies to increase the speed of the current 4G network by a factor of 100, while at the same time reducing the power consumption of the network by 90%.  
BLUESPACE is one of 21 new projects launched in June 2017 as part of phase 2 of the European Commission's 5G Public Private Partnership program - 5G-PPP. The challenge for this program is to secure Europe’s leadership in the particular areas where Europe is strong or where there is potential for creating new markets such as smart cities, e-health, intelligent transport, education or entertainment & media.
For more information, see the 5G research website.

Hybrid and networked control systems

In the design of many engineering systems it is no longer possible to develop the control system in isolation.

Next-generation high-tech systems require tight coordination between computation, communication and control elements on the one hand, and physical processes such as heating, cooling, motion, vibrations etc. on the other hand. See the control systems technology website.

Mobility as a Service (MAAS)

In contributing to the development of Mobility as a Service (MaaS) in smart cities, the SCRIPTS research program will execute a series of integrated PhD and postdoc projects that will deliver (I) New models to predict the demand for demand responsive transport services that are flexible in routes and schedules and are organized through IC-enabled platforms, (II) a set of models for investigating the effects of such flexible mobility options on traffic and service level of existing
infrastructures, (III) an evaluation framework addressing institutional
aspects of such innovations.

For more information see the SCRIPTS website.

Mobile Perception Systems lab

TU/e's Mobile Perception Systems lab focuses on artificial intelligence for vision-based sensing, mapping, and localization. These technologies allow vehicles to perceive and understand their environment, which is key for highly automated driving.

Our scientific disciplines include 3D computer vision, machine/deep learning, and data fusion and we work closely with our local
automotive industries, such as TomTom, Qualcomm, and Siemens.
For more information, see the Mobile Perception Systems website.