Cidaut has successfully finished CERO Project, with the cooperation of three automotive companies from Castile and Leon region: Grupo Antolín Ingeniería, ZF TRW and Casple S.A. The project has been funded by the “Instituto para la Competitividad Empresarial”. The main objective achieved thanks to the development of the project has been the research and development of new urban mobility solutions based on the integration of connectivity, automation and electrification. Cidaut considers that the electrification of the mobility should start in the urban environment for several reasons: importance of the air quality in cities, better energy performance of electric vehicles in urban driving conditions and easiness for infrastructure access. In several phases of the project, Casple’s urban electric vehicle prototype has been used to demonstrate the results achieved.S.A.
The project has been divided in three main tasks, the first one oriented to determine the needs of the future urban electric vehicles, the second aimed to obtain integral safety for this kind of vehicles and the third one looking for the enhancement of the communication capability of vehicles and infrastructure. The first task has allowed to establish a deep knowledge about the new urban transport needs from last mile logistics to mobility as a service solution that will have to overcome the tight mobility restrictions that will be progressively applied in different cities in the coming years and that have been also analyzed along CERO Project.
The second activity has covered all the aspects relative to safety from an integral point of view. The automated driving blurs the limit between active and passive safety, integrating both with the final objective of reducing the fatalities to CERO. The project has advanced in this direction presenting innovative solutions not only for the occupants but also for other vulnerable users of the road. In collaboration with ZF TRW, new restrain systems for automated driving levels 3 and 4 have been developed taking into account the new positions of the occupants in the automated vehicles. The pedestrians and cyclists safety has been improved through the development of artificial vision solutions, which identifies this kind of users, evaluates the risk of accident and alerts the vulnerable user and the driver/car (depending on the degree of automation) about the possible accident.
Finally low cost communication solutions have been developed for V2X applications. The solution adopted has allowed the implementation of different advanced solutions that will allow to increase the safety, improve the traffic flow and reduce the environmental impact of the traffic. Some of the communication applications tested along CERO project are: traffic jam detection, information about road works, allocation of points of interest, and speed recommendation to optimize green light flux.