Call a car and be picked up: Model cars show future transport scenario at the German IT Summit
How to get from one point to another in the “City of Tomorrow” shows a new Fraunhofer FOKUS scenario, developed in cooperation with the Daimler AG, the European Center for Information and Communication Technologies (EICT) and “Münchner Kreis”. A first showcase with model cars was presented at this year’s Federal Government IT Summit in Munich. The demonstration shows how in the future cars can be asked to come to a certain pick-up-point and take passengers to a pre-programmed destination autonomously.Therefore, the vehicles exchange data among each other but also with the transport infrastructure (i.e. traffic lights). That way they can be directed through the streets in efficient queues (via so called “Platooning”) as well as with phased traffic lights. Thus not only the traffic becomes more efficient, but it also reduces the risk of accidents. Of course the cars are powered electrically and reload re-charged automatically by induction. A large part of the necessary technologies are still in a development stage. In order to gain an insight into the interaction of cars and the transport infrastructure at an early stage without having the need of complex field tests, it is necessary to build simulation environments, as it is be done within the VSimRTI project. Besides purely software-based simulations, especially tests with model cars come up with valuable information about how autonomously operating cars cope with the urban road jungle.
More info:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sv2GWsMIfNk
http://www.dcaiti.tu-berlin.de/research/simulation
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