In the last week of October, 5G-MOBIX partners working on the 250 km-long cross-border corridor between Vigo and Oporto successfully carried out trial demonstrations of advanced CCAM use cases related to motorways and urban routes. The trial of motorway use case was carried out with autonomous and connected prototypes focusing on the scenarios of lanes merging onto the motorway, overtaking, and HD maps that display detected roadworks in real time; while an urban route scenario was tested with an autonomous shuttle.
In all the scenarios tested, 5G connectivity helped increase the safety and fluidity of the manoeuvres when the necessary information was not picked up by the vehicle’s sensors and at the same time increasing redundancy when the vehicle’s own sensors already detected the information. In terms of autonomous driving, CTAG technical team considers the support of 5G technology essential to increase their electronic horizon and to see beyond the range of the vehicle’s sensors.
Irene Saco from CTAG Technical Team commented: “During the current trials, we have been able to prove that with a stable network without downtime or sudden changes in latency, it is possible to run the scenarios of each use case successfully and provide services that will be of real value to the users of the road and 5G in the future.” The trials on the cross-border corridor proved that increasing security and enlarging the margin for improvement of the 5G network are main key points to work on from this point onwards. “We will continue to run the real road scenarios to close them end-to-end from a development and functionality point of view, focusing on the control algorithms used for high speed and to complete the testing with participants.”
The next steps for the service providers are achieving improvements in order to obtain a stable and robust network by increasing the connection speed, improving on today’s fiber optics and providing a stable connection with low latency. Finally, the speed of data transfer needs to be improved, which will contribute to immediate and uninterrupted communications, allowing seamless use of parallel services and more connected devices.
The partnership involved in the Spain-Portugal cross-border corridor includes several complementary stakeholders covering the complete value chain from vehicle manufactures, telecom companies, and public administrations to research institutions from the consortium such as CTAG, NOKIA ES, NOKIA BEL LABS, ISEL, IT, ATOBE, NOS, NOKIA PT, and TELEFÓNICA.
While a public demonstration is also scheduled at a later stage on the Spain – Portugal corridor as the trials from the last week of October were carried out in the presence of the European Commission and consortium partners only, 5G-MOBIX trials continue on other trial sites. Public demonstration events are scheduled in the first quarter of 2022 at the French Trial Site and Turkey – Greece cross-border corridor.
5G-MOBIX, one of ERTICO’s Connected and Automated Driving projects, is a cross-border collaboration aimed at testing, analysing, and expanding the role of 5G technology for advanced Cooperative, Connected and Automated Mobility use cases. The project, a product of collaboration between 53 partners from 10 countries, uses trial sites in the Netherlands, Finland, France, Germany, South Korea, and China as well as two cross-border corridors, one between Spain and Portugal and one between Turkey and Greece.
The 5G-MOBIX project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no 825496.
