CyberCars Project Underway in 12 European Cities
IVsource.net
8 March 2002

Ten million Euro project devoted to the use of individual automated vehicles which run on city streets as an alternative to the use of private cars and as a complement to public mass transportation. Twelve European cities are participating, along with research labs and technology providers.

A three year contract was awarded last August, based on exploring the concept of individual automated vehicles which run on city streets or in private grounds as an alternative to the use of private cars and as a complement to public mass transportation and non-motorized travel. The objectives of such a project are to improve the attractivity and quality of life in cities by reducing the use and the parking needs of traditional cars and by offering a cleaner and safer transportation mode available to everyone including people who cannot drive.

The CyberCars consortium consists of 14 industrial and academic research partners, with a total budget close to 10 M€. Within the European Commission research structure, the IST (Information Society Technologies) Programme will finance research and development for the vehicles and the infrastructure, while the EESD (Energy, Environment and Sustainable Development) Programme will finance the urban studies and the experiments.

Twelve European cities have officially declared their interest in participating in these studies and experimental applications.

An Evolution of Car-Sharing Approaches
In many urban environments, the usage of the private automobile has led to severe problems with respect of pollution, noise, safety and general degradation of the quality of life. Alternative solutions to the private automobile with the same flexibility now appear with a new concept of mobility : the automobile is part of the public transportation system and is used as a complement to mass transit and non-motorized transportation.

These concepts of new mobility using the advantages of the automobile but in the form of a public system have started with car-sharing : a small fleet of cars is shared among a large number of users. First available on a very limited basis, these systems have been extended to several cities in Switzerland and the possibility to get a car at both ends of a trip by train. This concept, very popular now in Switzerland and in Germany with several thousands of regular users is being extended with modern fleet management technologies in order to allow also very small trips and no need to return the car to its point of origin (projects Praxitèle and Liselec in France).

However, these system work well only in specific areas where the demand is properly structured. Furthermore, they do not offer a door to door service : the vehicles are only available at a few locations, and they have to be returned to these locations.

With CyberCars, a new form of vehicle-sharing is now appearing with a new type of vehicle : the automated vehicle. These vehicles have automated driving capabilities on an existing road infrastructure where they just need a right of way, such as a dedicated bus-lane. Of course, with the existing technologies, the speed of these vehicles is limited at around 30 km/h but this is quite sufficient in many urban environments and the technology, as well as the infrastructures (with dedicated high speed sections) will certainly evolve. Some of these vehicles can also allow for traditional manual driving in order to run among normal traffic. In these cases, the vehicles are called dual-mode and their automated capabilities allow them to be put in platoons, for example in order to collect them.

Dual-Mode Automated Vehicles
Eventually, this concept of dual mode vehicle which runs automatically in certain urban environment, could be applied to private vehicle which would then be allowed (with possibly some restrictions and certainly with an access fee), to have access to these restricted areas. This is not a backward step in returning to the existing situation since these private vehicles would certainly run with clean fuels in these situations, be controlled in speed and in parking, would pay for the access right and could park automatically (underground or remote locations) when not in use.

Several companies and research organizations have been involved in the last ten years in the development of these new CyberCar vehicles. The first systems based on these vehicles have been put in operation in the Netherlands at the end of 1997 and have been running successfully since then. Several other systems are now being implemented in Europe, which is the clear world leader in this technology.

Bringing the European Actors Together
The objective of the project CyberCar is to bring all the European actors of this field together in order to test and exchange best practices, share some of the development work and progress faster in the experiments. Several cities throughout Europe have already accepted to participate in the project and will study with the partners of the project the potentiality to run such systems and give their specific constraints. A major part of the work carried during the project, will be the development and test of several key technologies for the enhancement of the existing systems, such as:
¨ better guidance
¨ better collision avoidance
¨ better energy management
¨ better fleet management
¨ development of simple and standard user interfaces.

Cooperative work is also needed at the European level in order to reach a consensus on the certification techniques of these systems which are now developed in a very imprecise regulatory framework.

INRIA is installing on its campus an experimental system consisting of half a dozen available automated vehicles in order to test various technologies in a realistic environment with users from the organization. The test ground consists of a network of roads of more than one kilometer. This network is shared with pedestrians and a few ordinary cars. The installation of this network and the vehicles was planned for completion in late 2001.

The project leader is Dr. Michel Parent of INRIA, at michel.parent@inria.fr. Partners include automaker Fiat; Yamaha Motor Company Europe; Frog Systems, RUF Denmark, and Serpentine (makers of autonomous public vehicles); Robosoft, and several universities and technology firms.

Cities participating in CyberCars include:
¨ Lyon, France
¨ Antibes, France
¨ Rome, italy
¨ Lausanne, Switzerland
¨ Cardiff, Wales
¨ Amsterdam, Netherlands

For more information about the project and its partners, see the official Web sites :www.cybercars.org and www.cybermove.org.

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For More Information ...

... about the project and its partners, see the official Web sites http://www.cybercars.org and http://www.cybermove.org .

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