TEST & SAFETY SYSTEMS
IN PURSUIT OF PRECISION
Satellites have brought great benefits to safety and navigation, but there are limits. Robert Gough considers how existing technology can be harnessed to take mobility to the next level
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egislation published in October 2019 by the EU requires all newly registered vehicles in categories M, N and O to
incorporate a host of advanced driver assistance features. This means that, from this year, any vehicle with four or more wheels used to transport passengers or goods will need to have an autonomous emergency braking (AEB) system, intelligent speed assist, lane keep assist and vulnerable road user (VRU) detection, among many other features. That such a wide range of advanced
driver assistance systems (ADAS) features are now mandatory for type
GNSS data has traditionally been used to provide position information
approval only eight years after Euro NCAP started testing AEB car-to-car, shows how rapid the pace of ADAS test development has become. Whereas historically, dynamic
measurements such as acceleration, slip angle, wheel speed or attitude were key to vehicle development, accurate location is increasingly becoming the key measurement due to this rapid growth in ADAS development. Twenty-two years ago, selective
availability of GPS was discontinued. Selective availability was a deliberate degrading of the civilian GPS signals to only allow accuracies up to 100m. Turning this system off suddenly allowed cheap commercial receivers to achieve accuracies of a few metres. This made possible an entirely new industry of satellite navigation with the market for in-car satnavs expanding rapidly throughout the early 2000s. More advanced techniques such as
Safety is key with autonomous vehicles. Closed test tracks play a vital role here 22
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real-time kinematic (RTK) allowed centimetre-level position accuracies and again, it is no coincidence that, a couple of decades on from the year 2000, systems such as lane departure
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