Europe developing positioning engine for autonomous driving

A three-year 5.4m EUR project called ESCAPE is kicking off, enabling the European Agency for global navigation satellite systems, GSA to exploit its Galileo system for automated driving.

By 2019, the ESCAPE consortium will finish the development of a positioning engine tailored to meet the safety requirements of road transport applications involving automation which have the potential to harm or damage people and goods.

The first mass-market GPS+Galileo chipset receiver with multi-frequency capability tailored for the automotive sector is a fundamental element of this innovative positioning device.

Funding ESCAPE is a new EU R&D mechanism called the GSA fundamental elements programme which is supporting the development of EGNSS-enabled chipsets, receivers and antennas.

Its principal objective is facilitating the adoption of the European GNSS systems and improving the competitiveness of the EU industry, by addressing specific user needs in priority market segments.

Spanish company Ficosa is leading ESCAPE (European Safety Critical Applications Positioning Engine) in collaboration with GMV from Spain, Renault and IFSTTAR from France, STMicroelectronics and Istituto Superiore Mario Boella from Italy.

It will coordinate the relevant industrial and research institutions in Europe to create a positioning engine for safety-critical applications on the road such as automated driving.

All partners are stakeholders in safety-critical applications for road transportation.

ESCAPE enables a high grade of data fusion with different vehicle sensors and the exploitation of the main technological differentiators such as the “precise point positioning” service (PPP).

It can also potentially use the Galileo ionospheric model and the provision of an “integrity layer” to assess the degree of trust one can associate to the position information provided by the device.

The use of the “integrity layer” is crucial: in safety-critical applications, it is often said to be more important to know whether the information is reliable or not than the precise information itself.

ESCAPE will set a new paradigm among and across the technologies enabling road vehicle automation, following the vision of the companies that joined the project.

The pathway is the integration of multiple sources of positioning information (various satellite constellations, various signal frequencies, and multiple onboard sensors including maps) and high accuracy services.