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Carsales Staff15 May 2014
NEWS

Competitors join forces for UR:BAN project

BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Opel are just three of the names supporting a new traffic management project
Car manufacturers in Europe are actively involved in a new project to diminish urban congestion and enhance road safety in the 21st Century.
Named UR:BAN (taken from a German acronym for 'Urban Space: User-oriented assistance systems and network management'), the four-year project has been running since 2012 and has now reached its half-way point. The German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy has funded the project, with 31 partners from the automotive industry, electronics/software development, research institutes and municipalities participating. 
Three separate avenues of approach are being investigated for the project: "Cognitive Assistance", "Networked Traffic System" and "Human Factors in Traffic".
BMW, which is involved in all three areas, claims that modern driver assistance systems are primarily aimed at freeway driving and in the main are irrelevant to urban driving. Working on "Protection of Vulnerable Road Users" – a sub-category of the "Cognitive Assistance" research – BMW is looking at ways of adapting autonomous braking/steering to react to misadventure by pedestrians in the city. 
Any new system, it's suggested, must be aimed at a more sophisticated level of 'urban autonomy' than just bringing the car to an emergency stop when a pedestrian steps out in front. It has to select, for instance, when to ignore pedestrians standing on a street corner waiting to cross as the car makes a turn at the same corner. Other scenarios that might test an advanced new system of this type include bottlenecks, on-coming traffic and changing lanes.
A 5 Series adapted for the project – and demonstrated at the project's mid-term event – features a pedestrian detection system that can actually identify from the head and upper torso in which direction the pedestrian is moving and whether he or she is at risk as the car approaches. The challenge facing BMW is not the development of autonomous driving systems or pedestrian detection technology, it's formulating "assessment algorithms" that can "correctly interpret complex situations involving many different protagonists and boundary conditions."
BMW's archrival, Mercedes-Benz, is also committed to the UR:BAN project, but has limited the scope of its involvement to 'Cognitive Assistance' only. One example of the way a future system might work, according to Benz, is an on-board camera watching for a driver to turn his or her head over the shoulder – as a predictor of a lane change. A sufficiently advanced system could post lane-change assistance information for the driver in the car's instrument binnacle.
Prof Dr-Ing Ralf Guido Herrtwich is the Head of Corporate Research and Advanced Engineering Driver Assistance Systems at Daimler AG. As he explained in a press release, work on the UR:BAN project mirrors work Mercedes-Benz is already undertaking.
"The UR:BAN initiative perfectly matches our "Real-Life Safety' strategy, with which we want to prevent accidents and mitigate their consequences. The intelligent fusion of sensors and systems helps in detecting potential dangers in urban traffic and reacting to them in a timely manner.
"With our involvement we want to further improve the safety of all road users. New assistance systems will significantly reduce the hazards for less protected road users such as pedestrians, cyclists or wheelchair users".
Like BMW, Opel is participating in all three 'pillars' of the UR:BAN program. Opel spokesman Michael F. Ableson, in his capacity as Member of the Management Board and GM Europe Vice President of Engineering, explained that for all the work undertaken on intelligent on-board electronic systems, human beings are at the very epicentre of that work.
"The focus is always on the human being," Abelson was quoted saying in a press release. "Teams of engineers, physicists and traffic psychologists are exploring assistance in difficult situations, the intelligent networking of vehicles and infrastructure, driver behaviour, and the appropriate human-machine interaction for urban driving."
Opel has contributed work in the area of "collision avoidance by steering and braking" with a driver assistance system that specifically takes evasive action by steering rather than braking. The company believes this type of system will ultimately save the lives of pedestrians in the city and suburbs, as well as avoiding collisions with other vehicles. Opel's demonstration vehicle is equipped with radar and camera technology, linked to modified braking and steering systems. 
In the 'Urban Roads' sub-category of "Networked Traffic System" both BMW and Opel have been collaborating with project partners on a means of improving traffic flow to lower fuel consumption/CO2 emissions. This involves live traffic data and traffic light timing relayed to the car. Imagine a world in which the car slows or speeds up to catch every light as it turns green. 
Optimising traffic flow in this way can yield even better results in hybrid and plug-in vehicles that can take advantage of rapidly changing traffic situations. For this element of the project BMW has recruited X5 and 4 Series test vehicles. Field tests will begin later this year. 
BMW is also heavily involved in two sub-categories within the "Human Factors in Traffic" element of the project. The broader aim of this aspect of the project is to turn the car into an 'active helper' as an emergency unfolds. 
For one of the sub-categories – "Controllability – BMW has linked up with higher education faculties and research institutes also engaged in the work to "devise a standardised and methodical basis for an efficient and valid form of verifying the controllability of functions and HMI concepts." 
Nup, we don't know what that means either...
Opel is concentrating its efforts in "Human Factors in Traffic" on "human-machine interaction." Psychologists, engineers and physicists are pooling their thoughts to establish what sort of information drivers need to know and how best to reduce driver distractions.
For "Behaviour Prediction and Intention Detection" BMW, Opel and other partners are working on systems that will adapt and even predict the driver's responses to emergencies – with the aim of simplifying the driver's tasks or expediting input from the driver. Brake Assist would be an early example of this sort of thinking but this system features a predictive algorithm that can 'learn' from the way drivers start to lift their foot off the accelerator in a specific circumstance, for example, or how they start to veer in one direction or another before taking full-blown evasive action. 
50 volunteers completed a set drive route in controlled conditions to provide data based on their reactions to unexpected situations. It's the hope of the partners in this field test that the algorithm will one day be able to choose whether to intervene or leave the driver to resolve the problem he or she faces. 
As for its partners in the project, BMW anticipates that UR:BAN will foster radical improvements in traffic flow in the future, just as Dr Christoph Grote, Managing Director of BMW Forschung und Technik explained in a press release. 
"This will enable us to further increase safety, efficiency and comfort in urban areas to significant effect," he said. 
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Written byCarsales Staff
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