Key Vehicle Technologies for Cooperative Connected Automated Mobility (CCAM): Is the level of maturity sufficient for high-level automation?

Robust and accurate environment perception is absolutely essential for highly automated vehicles to enable the safe and unambiguous extraction of reliable information for real-time driving decision-making. Vehicle technologies need to reliably identify, track and discriminate between benign and hazardous objects in the path of the vehicle, under the full range of environmental conditions in which the vehicle is intended to operate. This session addresses the different challenges which must be overcome through advances in vehicle technologies in order to enable CCAM with higher levels of automation to become reality in the near future.

My contribution to the panel hosted by the European Commission discussed the basics of automated vehicle sensors (camera, radar, LiDAR), sensor fusion, and the market outlook.

One topic that I emphasized in particular at the end is recalibration of those sensors once vehicles age and need repair. A recent study showed that just replacing sensors is not enough, they need to get recalibrated for e.g. automated emergency braking (AEB) to work properly. However, those procedures might be costly and not every repair shop might be able to perform those; so that sensors might just get replaced but not recalibrated – and the ADAS won’t work or actually cause additional risk.