The solution is available for purchase exclusively from Velodyne. It has already been deployed in multiple North American cities with upcoming installations in New Jersey and more deployments across the United States.

Velodyne have also announced a sales agreement with Rutgers Center for Advanced Infrastructure and Transportation (CAIT) to deploy its Intelligent Infrastructure Solution equipped with Velodyne’s Alpha Prime LiDAR sensors. CAIT will install the solution at multiple intersections in New Brunswick, New Jersey as part of the Middlesex County – Smart Mobility Testing Ground (MC-SMTG) project in collaboration with the New Jersey Department of Transportation (NJDOT). This project will serve as a testbed for mobility data gathering, analysis, and sharing technologies that will help implement connected and autonomous vehicle systems in the future. CAIT selected the Velodyne solution after a rigorous vetting process, in which they tested other sensor solutions and competitive LiDAR systems.

Velodyne’s solution creates a real-time 3D map of roads and intersections, providing precise traffic monitoring and analytics. It can collect data in any lighting or weather condition – supporting 24/7 operation, 365 days a year. The solution advances safety through multimodal analytics that can detect various road users – including vehicles, pedestrians, and cyclists. It can predict, diagnose, and address road safety challenges – helping municipalities and other customers make informed decisions and take corrective action. It is more cost-effective, and easier to install, than radar- and camera-based systems. This lower price point is because a single LiDAR sensor installed on a traffic pole can cover an entire intersection or highway section (compared to radar- and camera-based systems, that typically need multiple sensors to cover the same area). The solution works with Velodyne’s Alpha Prime, Ultra Puck, Puck, and Velarray sensors.

Velodyne’s LiDAR sensors do not identify individuals’ facial characteristics – a growing concern for civic applications. LiDAR has an advantage in privacy over camera-only systems because it does not record sensitive information, such as hair and skin color.

Velodyne’s lidar sensors can be used in a variety of Intelligent Transportation Systems to measure and monitor conditions in areas such as pedestrian safety, vehicle traffic and parking space management, and more. They can collect reliable, detailed traffic data about road users, including vehicles, pedestrians and bicyclists, while preserving anonymity. Velodyne’s lidar sensors do not identify individuals’ facial characteristics, a growing requirement for civic applications. In addition to transportation systems, Velodyne’s lidar sensors have a strong presence in autonomous vehicles and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS).

Velodyne has a long-standing commitment to fostering understanding of the safety and mobility benefits of autonomous vehicles and intelligent infrastructure to consumer, business, government, public safety and community audiences. These efforts include Velodyne’s World Safety Summit on Autonomous Technology. The event has sparked collaborative work to advance solutions for rolling out autonomy and ADAS with the goal of improving safety on the roadways. Velodyne also partners with Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) on public education about improving safety on roadways.

The technology company Continental announced a big step toward creating safer, smarter cities: a Smart City Mobility and Transportation Hub in Auburn Hills, Michigan. At the center of this Smart City Mobility and Transportation Hub are two intersections made intelligent thanks to Continental sensors and intelligent software integrated into the infrastructure. Ultimately, this technology will have the potential to improve traffic flow, add convenience, reduce pollution and, most importantly, significantly increase the intersection’s safety by communicating hidden dangers to approaching connected vehicles and pedestrians. Furthermore, Continental’s Wrong-Way Driver detection system, which warns at-risk drivers in the vicinity of a driver heading the wrong way, has also been installed.

In its current phase, the Smart City Mobility and Transportation Hub is collecting important non-personally identifiable information, like location and movement patterns, about pedestrians, vehicles and other intersection-related activity to create an environment model needed for infrastructure-to-everything (I2X) communication. The environment model provides information about traffic participants (i.e., vehicles and vulnerable road users), traffic infrastructure, static objects and the overall road situation to connected vehicles.

Proven technologies for new applications

For decades Continental has engineered products and systems for vehicles that make roads safer, driving more convenient and road users more connected. Now it is applying that same expertise to equip infrastructure with the ability to sense its surroundings and ultimately communicate what it sees to road users.

The Smart City Mobility and Transportation Hub infrastructure is equipped with Continental’s state-of-the-art short- and long-range radars. These radar sensors have been deployed on a number of vehicle platforms over the years, and enable functions like adaptive cruise control, blind spot detection, forward collision warning, lane change assist and more. Continental now looks to apply the economies of scale together with its software functions knowhow from automotive to the infrastructure.

From data analysis to making a difference

In addition to the Continental radar sensors, the Auburn Hills Smart City Mobility and Transportation Hub also has a roadside unit and electronic control unit to process data and run the environment model and functions.

This combination can offer a number of benefits, like counting the number of vehicles entering and exiting a specific zone to communicate the number of available parking spaces to interested vehicles. By connecting to a traffic light controller, traffic flow can be better optimized, reducing not only congestion, but also emissions from idling vehicles. The solution makes it possible to warn an approaching vehicle about occluded hazards such as pedestrians. With additional analysis and artificial intelligence, intention prediction of pedestrians becomes possible, helping to alert drivers to pedestrians planning to cross even when the vehicle has the right of way.

Wrong-Way Driver detection system implementation

An additional feature added to the Auburn Hills Smart City Mobility and Transportation Hub is Continental’s Wrong-Way Driver (WWD) detection system, which warns at-risk drivers in the vicinity of a driver heading the wrong way. Designed for deployment on freeways and highways, crashes involving a wrong-way driver are often catastrophic. In fact, in the U.S. on average there are approximately 295 crashes producing 389 fatalities each year, trending upwards over the last 5 years. Continental’s WWD detection system will be showcased at CES 2020.

Unlike other solutions on the market, Continental’s WWD detection system relies heavily on its premium automotive-grade radar sensors to detect wrong-way drivers. The detection technology uses a combination of Continental sensors, connected-vehicle systems and a heatmapping algorithm. The self-learning system automatically defines the roadways and directions of travel, then sends an alert via push notification to a mobile device or connected vehicle informing at-risk vehicles of the wrong-way driver’s location, speed and direction of travel.

This technology is packaged into a fixed-mount I2X roadside unit with low power requirements, making it suitable for solar power. The WWD detection system would be installed on existing poles and gantries near the beginning of highway exit ramps, not only detecting and alerting of wrong-way drivers just entering the highway, but also those who may have entered several miles before.

While this information and alert can be sent to authorities and at-risk drivers via I2V, V2X or SMS, it could potentially be integrated into widely used navigation apps, increasing penetration and effectiveness.

In addition to Auburn Hills, Continental operates a Smart City Mobility and Transportation Hub in Changsha, China, as well as Intelligent Intersections in Walnut Creek, California, and Columbus, Ohio, and plans to expand to other cities in the near future.

The platform also leverages information from HAVs to report infrastructure improvement needs, making the roads safer for all users.

While HAVs have greatly improved the ability to operate in complex traffic environments, street signs and lane stripes are an inexact way to communicate rules to a 21^st century vehicle. Currently onboard sensors, computer vision, machine learning and/or third-party datasets are used to triage roadway guidelines, but this approach is imprecise, costly (resources and dollars) and increases the risk of rule violations. INRIX AV Road Rules enables cities and road authorities to quickly and easily digitize local restrictions such as speed limits, crosswalks, school zones and stop signs, allowing automakers and HAV operators to ensure vehicles comply with local guidelines. The platform also creates a channel to communicate road infrastructure needs from HAVs back to transportation agencies, which improves safety and performance for all road users.

At launch, seven cities and road authorities and four HAV operators have signed on to support INRIX AV Road Rules, and many more have expressed interest in joining when it expands later this year.

The initial set of pilot users includes cities and road authorities with a variety of sizes, climates and geographies: Austin, TX; Boston, MA; Cambridge, MA; Portland, ME; Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada which includes Las Vegas; Transport for West Midlands and Transport Scotland in the UK. Automakers and operators slated to use the platform at launch include: Jaguar Land Rover, May Mobility, nuTonomy (an Aptiv company) and operators running Renovo’s Aware platform. The initial set of partners will help refine and expand the platform to improve a crucial tool for road authorities to fulfill their traditional role of setting and maintaining traffic rules and restrictions.

Source: INRIX

In the effort to reduce traffic congestion and improve safety with intelligent transportation systems (ITS), government and the private sector should look to existing mobile network infrastructure and be prepared to embrace data liberalization, according to automotive research firm SBD and HERE.

In their joint whitepaper, SBD and HERE argue that ITS managers can avoid the pitfalls that have plagued many ITS projects during the last decade by taking advantage of recent technological advances.

“Spending on ITS has so far tended to end up in costly hardware-heavy projects, the vast majority of which have not been commercially sustainable,” said the co-authors of the study Andrew Hart of SBD and Bernd Fastenrath of HERE. “Fortunately, the growth of powerful mobile networks, the proliferation of sensors and the increasing maturity of connected data analytics are paving the way for software-richer ITS designs. For ITS managers, it means effective solutions are attainable which are affordable, scalable and interoperable.”

The authors argue that any design lacks utility, however, if ITS participants fail to enter into a new spirit of collaboration, especially around data. A city in motion generates a tremendous volume of data yet, for the most part, that data is untapped and its potential value is not fully captured. To do so means connecting vehicles, individuals, city and road infrastructure, and traffic authorities to enable a meaningful volume of quality data to be pooled and analyzed – no single car manufacturer or road transit authority can create a data ecosystem alone.

According to SBD and HERE, some USD 89 billion has been spent in the last decade on large-scale ITS schemes which have either failed to meet their stated objectives or suffered lengthy delays. Additionally, despite a large volume of government-funded research projects and trials, a disproportionately small number have translated into commercial deployments. In many cases, the critical enabling technologies have lacked maturity, have been too costly, or have not been sufficiently user-friendly.

The whitepaper can be downloaded here: http://sbd.co.uk/here

Source: HERE and SBD

Continental is putting together an international team of innovators from the IT and automotive industries who will focus on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). The new business unit, called “Continental Intelligent Transportation Systems, LLC”, will be headquartered in Silicon Valley, California, USA, and headed by Seval Oz, an expert in vehicle networking and automation. In her previous role she worked on Google’s self-driving car project.

“This step is an excellent example of our strategy to make the car an integral part of the ‘Internet of Everything’. Our key objectives include eliminating road accidents, minimizing energy consumption, maximizing comfort and usability of vehicles, and enabling them to exchange information with each other in real-time,” said Dr. Elmar Degenhart, CEO of Continental. He added: “Our new Team will be combining some of the key strengths required to create this kind of pioneering innovation – these strengths include the know-how and inventiveness of Silicon Valley’s leading experts in digital technology and the expertise of Continental in developing unique and reliable solutions for large-scale automotive production.”

Three out of every four cars around the world today contain Continental’s solutions, products, and systems that make driving safer, more environmentally compatible and more comfortable. ITS is the extensive, intelligent networking of modes of transport and traffic facilities, through which vehicles will become part of a new traffic guidance system. The networked vehicle (NV) – or connected car – and ITS are seen as essential technology for future transportation.

“ITS opens up many new business opportunities for Continental. Our new business unit will further enhance our competitiveness in this market,” said Helmut Matschi, member of Continental’s Executive Board and President of the Interior Division. “That’s why we have chosen Silicon Valley as our new location. In addition to our existing competence, the Bay Area has the technology and talent for developing connected cars and ITS that we need to build solutions for more than just prototypes.”

“I’m incredibly excited to lead Continental’s ITS team in the direction of developing world-class engineering services. Our mission is to dramatically improve mobility and safety by forging strong partnerships in both the tech and automotive realm,” Seval Oz said.

Continental is already one of the main suppliers of core ITS components. ITS provides the perfect platform to find solutions to global transportation problems such as gridlock, traffic-induced pollution, and accidents caused by human error. Networked vehicles, which can instantly communicate with each other and with the infrastructure, open up a whole range of possibilities for new user functions. Intelligent applications will make driving safer, more comfortable and more environmentally friendly. Such applications include using data from other vehicles and the infrastructure, or a backend (the cloud), to inform the driver about dangers or obstacles along the route as well as other inputs such as travel, fleet, and traffic management. For the development of such solutions data protection is of utmost priority. To develop world-class systems, Continental has already signed partnership contracts with the leading technology suppliers in big data (IBM), trusted security (Cisco) and maps (Nokia HERE).

Seval Oz, the CEO of the new company, will be responsible for all new business and activities connected with Continental’s ITS endeavors worldwide. In her previous position Seval Oz served as Senior Business Development Manager at Google Inc., where she was integral in the business development and marketing efforts surrounding the launch of the self-driving car.

Source: Continental