Communication in autonomous vehicles

Communication in autonomous vehicles will be a key technology in autonomous driving. They can benefit from the other vehicles’ experiences through the cloud, download data that they have gathered onto freely accessible maps in real time and send danger warnings to their surrounding area via WLAN.

Nowadays, sensor systems such as lidar, radar and cameras can already provide a highly precise image of an autonomous vehicle’s environment. These vehicles can react to what is happening around them in combination with artificial intelligence and complex algorithms – almost like a human being. Yet like people, the vehicles can only use these sensors to react to things in their field of view. Consequently, to be able to “look around the corner”, autonomous vehicles will have to be connected and capable of communicating with their surrounding area and infrastructure.

“The transfer of data to vehicles is a core technology for automated driving, for real-time application, as well as for maintenance and service,” Armin G. Schmidt, CEO of Advanced Telematic Systems (ATS), emphasises. The German software company focuses on connected vehicles and develops solutions for the future of mobility, for which it relies on the establishment of industry-wide standards and open-source technology. “The exchange of data between vehicles, such as between different provider platforms, also requires further standardisation development,” Schmidt continues.

Warning the Surrounding Area in Milliseconds

Standard ITS-G5 of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) has been established for the communication of vehicles in road traffic. This is a variant of the IEEE 802.11 WLAN standard that has been optimised for data exchange between vehicles and has since also been recognised in the United States. It uses the 5.9-GHz frequency band and makes communication possible over short distances in close to real time. The technology ensures a reliable transfer at a high vehicle speed, as well as allowing direct communication between individual vehicles (car-to-car) and between the vehicle and infrastructure (car-to-X, vehicle-to-X or V2X) without a router. This means that sudden events or hazardous situations can be communicated to the surrounding area within only a few milliseconds. For example, if a car has been involved in an accident or a bank of fog forms ahead, it can automatically warn approaching traffic heading in the same direction. “The benefits of safety and awareness of V2X as a sensor – with its ability to ‘see around the corner’ – have already been proven beyond doubt as a means to providing relevant and reliable early warning messages for advanced driver assistance systems,” explains Jozef Kovacs, CEO of US firm Commsignia, a provider of software and hardware solutions for connected cars.

In the future, however, road vehicles will most likely not only be equipped with communications technology. Initial solutions are implementing an “adaptive hybrid network concept”. This includes integrating various wireless technologies – such as ITS-G5, LTE mobile communications or 60-GHz technologies – into a communications stack (the waveform and the typical receiver algorithms of the IEEE 802.11ad WLAN standard are used here, providing a common framework for vehicle communication and radar technologies at 60 GHz). The ideal communication technology is selected adaptively, meaning that it depends on the situation in real time. Criteria for selecting wireless technology include its predicted availability or its signal quality.

Quantity of data generated each day by an autonomous vehicle.
Source: Intel

Cameras: 20-24 MB each second
Lidar: 10-70 MB each second
Sonar: 10-100 KB each second
Radar: 10-100 KB each second
GPS: 50 KB each second

To the Cloud with 5G

Wireless technologies offer the advantage of unlimited range, whereas ITS-G5 can only bridge distances of up to one kilometre. For example, LTE networks are already in use in the automatic emergency call system ECall. Though yet to be implemented, the 5G network will assume this role in the future. “We expect 5G to become the worldwide dominating mobile communications standard of the next decade,” says Dr Christoph Grote, Senior Vice President of Electronics at BMW, adding that: “for the automotive industry, it is essential that 5G fulfills the challenges of the era of digitalisation and autonomous driving.” For this reason, BMW, along with Audi, Daimler, Ericsson, Huawei, Intel, Nokia and Qualcomm, founded the 5G Automotive Association which aims to develop, test and promote communications solutions. “Cloud, communications and networking technologies and innovations have the potential to transform the car into a fully connected device to revolutionise the driver experience and address society’s mobility needs,” explains Dr Marc Rouanne, Chief Innovation & Operating Officer at Nokia.

Cloud, communications and networking technologies and innovations have the potential to transform the car into a fully connected device to revolutionise the driver experience.” 

Dr Marc Rouanne, Chief Innovation & Operating Officer, Nokia

Swarm Data Paves Way for Automated Driving

These types of technologies, for instance, provide the means to share the experiences that an adaptive autonomous vehicle has gained with other vehicles via the Cloud. Cloud technologies are also opening up new possibilities for navigation. By way of example, Mobileye, an Israeli company that creates accident prevention and automated driving technologies, has developed the camera-based mapping and localisation technology Road Experience Management (REM). Real-time data from numerous vehicles – a swarm of cars – is collected via crowdsourcing before being used for precise localisation and to record high-definition lane data. To accomplish this, the vehicles deploy optical sensor systems to detect road markings and road information, which flow to the Cloud in compressed format. This fleet data is used to continuously improve HD navigation maps with high-precision localisation capability and, in turn, is a basic necessity for automated driving and for assistance systems to be further developed. “The future of autonomous driving depends on the ability to create and maintain precise high-definition maps and scale them at minimal cost,” co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Mobileye, Prof. Amnon Shashua, summarises. At the start of 2017, Mobileye made an agreement with the Volkswagen Group to implement a new navigation standard for automated driving from 2018 onwards. Future Volkswagen models will use REM. The agreement will facilitate the worldwide consolidation of data from different automobile manufacturers into an “HD world map”, the first of its kind. That will form an industry-wide standard. According to Dr Frank Welsch, Member of the Board of Management of the Volkswagen brand with responsibility for development: “Every day, millions of Volkswagen vehicles drive on our streets. Many of them are equipped with sensors to monitor the surroundings. We can now utilise this swarm to obtain various environmental data in anonymised form related to traffic flow, road conditions and available parking places, and we can make these highly up-to-date data available in higher-level systems. More services are planned which will be able to utilise these data and make car driving and mobility easier with greater convenience and comfort overall.”

(picture credit: Unsplash)

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