Last weekend, the Brainport Region in the Netherlands hosted an international event in the field of cooperative driving: GCDC 2016. The Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge (GCDC) is one of the highlights of the i-GAME project, a European research project supported by the European Commission.

The GCDC 2016 consisted of a competitive demonstration taking place on the A270 highway between Helmond and Eindhoven, in which 10 European teams competed with each other. The demonstration was a combination of vehicle automation and vehicle-to-vehicle, as well as vehicle-to-infrastructure communication.

The event included a ‘demo’ in which a fire brigade truck sent out a signals so the cars in the platoon had to move and make way in an automated way for the emergency vehicle. This was possible thanks to the technology developed within the Compass4D project. Liam Breslin (Head of Unit at the European Comissions’ DG Research and Innovation) was one of the guests of honour and a passenger in the fire brigade truck.

With this kind of initiatives, the i-GAME research project and the GCDC 2016 have taken cooperative automation of vehicles to the next level and help speeding-up implementation. The underlying goal is to boost traffic safety and traffic flow and reduce fuel consumption and emissions.

The Halmstad Team from Sweden won the Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge 2016

 

Below: Interview with Fire Brigade representatives  (in Dutch)