Section: Application Domains

Future cars and transportation systems

Thanks to the introduction of new sensor and ICT technologies in cars and in mass transportation systems, and also to the pressure of economical and security requirements of our modern society, this application domain is quickly changing. Various technologies are currently developed by both research and industrial laboratories. These technologies are progressively arriving at maturity, as it is witnessed by the results of large scale experiments and challenges such as the Google’s car project and several future products announcements made by the car industry. Moreover, the legal issue starts to be addressed in USA (see for instance the recent laws in Nevada and in California authorizing autonomous vehicles on roads) and in several other countries (including France).

In this context, we are interested in the development of ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) systems aimed at improving comfort and safety of the cars users (e.g., ACC, emergency braking, danger warnings), and of Fully Autonomous Driving functions for controlling the displacements of private or public vehicles in some particular driving situations and/or in some equipped areas (e.g., automated car parks or captive fleets in downtown centers or private sites).

Since about 8 years, we are collaborating with Toyota and with Renault-Nissan on these applications (bilateral contracts, PhD Theses, shared patents), but also recently with Volvo group (PhD thesis started in 2016). We are also strongly involved (since 2012) in the innovation project Perfect of the IRT (Institut de Recherche Technologique) Nanoelec (transportation domain). In 2016, we have been awarded a European H2020 ECSEL project (ENABLE-S3: European Initiative to Enable Validation for Highly Automated Safe and Secure Systems.) involving major European automotive constructors and car suppliers. In this project, Chroma is focusing on the embedded perception component (models and algorithms, including the certification issue), in collaboration with Renault, Valeo and also with the Inria team TAMIS (Rennes). Chroma is also involved in the ANR project "Valet" (2015-2018) coordinated by the Inria team RITS (Rocquencourt), dealing with automatic redistribution of car-sharing vehicles and parking valet; Chroma is involved in the pedestrian-vehicle interaction for a safe navigation.

In this context, Chroma has two experimental vehicles equipped with various sensors (a Toyota Lexus and a Renault Zoe, see. Fig. 4 and Fig. 2), which are maintained by Inria-SED (Service Expérimentation et Développement) and that allow the team to perform experiments in realistic traffic conditions (Urban, road and highway environments). The Zoe car will be automated in December 2016 through our collaboration with the team of P. Martinet (IRCCyN Lab, Nantes) that will open us to new experiments and work.