Project overview

ERSEC is a "collaborative research project" funded by the European Community in the context of the SEVENTH FRAMEWORK PROGRAMME that groups key SMEs and research organizations, coming from four European countries to increase the positioning accuracy of the present technologies.
In fact the objectives of the ERSEC project is concerned with broadening the scope of application to road transport of the EGNOS/GNSS (and later Galileo) through an appropriate integration and data fusion with measurement data coming from other measuring instruments. More specifically, the S&T objective of the project is to develop a measuring system - to be used on board of terrestrial vehicles - able to output the position on the road map of the equipped vehicle and of all the obstacles around it with a measurement accuracy greater than the one of the current navigation system.

The project approach is based on an intelligent datafusion of the EGNOS/GNSS sensor positioning measurement, the Road-GIS digital local map data and the measurement data obtained from an instrument set installed on board of the vehicle, including vehicle dynamic sensors and environmental sensors.
The scope of the ERSEC project covers the study and development of the ERSEC measuring system moreover within the project a prototype vehicle will be set up with the ERSEC measuring system and a set of on road trials performed.

Field of application and impact

The availability of the ERSEC Measuring system will bring advantages in road vehicles field and more in general in the sector of active safety from ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) to Collision Avoidance Systems. In fact, the knowledge of vehicle and obstacle position and rate in the road map reference frame will enhance the reliability of the active control system intervention by helping to select a safer vehicle trajectory by referring to the local road geometry.
Moreover, the precise vehicle positioning in the road reference system will extend the safety intervention of the active control system for reducing the vehicle speed in proximity of a curve, in the event the speed appears too high and recognizing the danger of out-of-road for warning in time the driver and/or automatically intervene.

The availability of the ERSEC Measuring system will increase the potential of intervention to temporary substitute the driver in special situations like automatic parking, extending the applications by improving the safety of automatic driving such as in the out-of-parking procedure in roads of intensive traffic. But even more interesting is the advantage of ERSEC applications in the field of vehicle that do not need a driver like mobile robots. Apart from the military applications of unmanned vehicle, the civilian application of AGVs that follow markers or wires in the floor, has broadened during the late 20th century and they are no longer restricted only to industrial environments. In fact the availability of the ERSEC Measuring system represents a remarkable innovation in this sector because it opens the possibility of application of the AGVs also in constrained areas (industrial sites, airports, touristic or hospital centres), where nowadays the required infrastructures to implement the automatic vehicles guidance (rails, buried wires, magnetic beacons) are limiting the system functionality and flexibility and as a consequence the development of this kind of transport system.