Printer-friendly versionAltreonic's presentation at the "Vehicle of the future" track at the Bits&Chips Smart Systems 2014 conference/exhibition on 20 November 2014 's Hertogenbosch now available.
Safety-related pre-conditions for a sustainable automated mobility
Mobility as a Service
The dream of autonomous traffic poses a serious safety challenge. Each vehicle becomes a component in the transport system and must be error-resilient while the dynamic constraints are very high. The current car’s architecture is not in a position to provide this (ARRL-3) but a future electric or hybrid car might be able to (ARRL-5) and when integrated in a larger feedback-driven transport system it becomes an ARRL-7 component. ARRL stands for Assured Reliability and Resilience Level and is a novel criterion that defines safety in a wider context. Altreonic is researching these topics and working on developing a scalable and modular vehicle concept that is capable of meeting these requirements.
When talking about sustainability, systems engineering has always been at the foreground achieving this goal. Sustainability means that we have the economic resources to provide a solution but also that the result is socially accepted. In the domain of mobility and transport this means that we must engineer systems that are cost-efficient to produce, that require as little as possible of our earthly resources, that use as little energy as possible and are safe and comfortable to use. Many of these requirements are in conflict and hence good engineering is a trade-off exercise whereby a life cycle approach is often the best for our environment and economy.
In the domain of transport and mobility, the law of Newton applies and energy consumption is proportional to the weight and dynamic behaviour. New materials and a better design are key to reducing weight. Electronics and optimised control laws are key to provide a more adaptive and dynamic behaviour. In this context, the roadmap towards greener and safer mobility is likely to be electric whereby the vehicles increasingly move their passengers and cargo autonomously.
The dream of autonomous traffic however poses a serious safety challenge. Each vehicle becomes a component in the transport system and must be error-resilient while the dynamic constraints are very high. The current car’s architecture is not in a position to provide this (ARRL-3) but a future electric or hybrid car might be able to (ARRL-5) and when integrated in a larger feedback-driven transport system it becomes an ARRL-7 component. ARRL stands for Assured Reliability and Resilience Level and is a novel criterion that defines safety in a wider context.
Altreonic is researching these topics and working on developing a scalable and modular vehicle concept that is capable of meeting these requirements. The approach taken is a bottom-up one whereby the functionality and concept is first applied to small a single-passenger 4-wheel vehicle. The architecture is scalable and fault-tolerant using redundancy and distributed control functions. It can be scaled up to two or four-people vehicles and even larger to adopt bus and train modes of operation.
This talk discussed the approach followed and illustrated it shorty using a small electric 4-wheel vehicle in development by Altreonic.
BIO
Eric Verhulst has a broad polytechnic education in electronics and software, focusing in the last years on developing a formalised approach to embedded systems engineering. He has a long history of national and EU-level project participation since twenty years. The most recent ones are the IWT regionally funded project OpenComRTOS (formal development of a network-centric RTOS), ASIL (Automotive Safety Integrity Level, Flanders’ Drive), Evolve (ITEA), Crafters (Artemis), and Opencoss (FP7 IP). He is regularly involved in workshops defining the work programs, project and proposal reviews in domains ranging from embedded systems to advanced nano-electronics.
