Sensible 4 is one of 11 partners in the Horizon Europe project, EVENTS. Sensible 4 is known for its all-weather capabilities and the project supports the company’s vision of enabling automated vehicles to operate any time, and any where. A new 3-year Horizon Europe project EVENTS has started. Finnish automated driving technology company Sensible 4 is one of the 11 partners in the consortium tackling the automated driving challenge of operating safely and reliably in complex environmental conditions. These include, for example, dynamic traffic changes, harsh weather or light conditions, unstructured roads, imperfect data, and sensor or communication failures.
“Sensible 4 provides deep expertise in perception in adverse weather conditions, robust localisation and perception self-assessment. Innovation management is an integral part of our work at Sensible 4, so leading the EVENTS innovation and exploitation activities is a natural role for us to fulfil”, explains Povilas Valiauga, project manager at Sensible 4. He continues: “It’s exciting to be part of a European collaboration that’s focused on safely deploying automated vehicles onto the streets in the near future. The weather in Europe is not always sunny, so it’s essential that the automated vehicles are able to operate in complex environments and weather conditions that are subject to change. Europe, like many countries in the world, is suffering from a professional driver shortage and reliable automated vehicles provide one solution to the problem.”
EVENTS concentrates on automated driving challenges
The conditions, like harsh weather or unstructured roads, are creating challenges for Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) and they should be overcome in order to enable safe and reliable automated driving – therefore the project focuses on such events. An indicative, but non-exhaustive list of these challenges are:
- Perception in complex urban environments, in particular dealing with Vulnerable Road Users (VRUs)
- Perception in adverse weather and poor lighting conditions
- Perception under (partial) occlusions
- Accurate prediction of road user trajectory (especially if highly manoeuvrable, like VRUs)
- Utilisation of connectivity (off-board information) to improve accuracy, certainty & reliability of perception
- Reduction of the costs of the required sensor-suites
- Real-time decision-making and motion planning especially in uncertain situations
- Self-assessment of perception and localisation systems
EVENTS project is coordinated by the Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (ICCS). It aims to create a robust and resilient perception and decision-making system to tackle the abovementioned challenges. In EVENTS, if the system or some of the subsystems cannot perform with the expected quality and reliability an improved minimum risk manoeuvre is triggered.
Within the scope of the EVENTS project, and in order to cover a wide area of scenarios, the various types of “events” are clustered under three main use cases:
- Interaction with vulnerable road users in the complex urban environment
- Non-standard and unstructured road conditions
- Low visibility and adverse weather conditions
To achieve its objectives, EVENTS will bring together, adapt and improve technological advances, in perception and decision-making for real-time CAVs operation. In a summary, the major expected breakthroughs to be introduced by the EVENTS project, are the following:
- The robust and reliable perception of objects, and especially vulnerable road users, under complex urban traffic, and bad weather or low visibility conditions
- The improved perception performance while using cost-efficient sensor suites
- The real-time decision-making for CAVs under non-standard traffic and unstructured road conditions.
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