V2V antenna from Continental

In a recent press-release Continental presents a new antenna solution that integrates multiple antennas for various carriers together with their control electronics, from the press release:

"The new Intelligent Antenna Module is designed to integrate multiple antennas as well as the corresponding transmission and reception electronics into one unit. It enables wireless communication between the vehicle and its outside environment as well as inside the passenger compartment for applications like telephone, GPS, remote keyless entry, tire pressure monitoring system, WLAN, radio, TV or future car-to-car communication. The antenna module links via a digital bus to various control units in the vehicle, which process the data and make applications available to the user.

Continental and Kathrein, the world’s oldest antenna manufacturer, have designed the Intelligent Antenna Module to solve several challenges currently presented by wireless mobile communication. It lowers complexity, reduces costs and improves performance. Since the electronics are located directly at the antenna, less wiring than today is required. The system uses a single data bus connection to shuttle reception and transmission data between the antenna module and the end devices instead of up to ten coaxial cables required by conventional solutions. The concept is highly scalable. Tailored to the needs of the car manufacturer, any mixture of coaxial and databus connections is possible which will reduce the number of cables, connectors and elaborate intermediate amplifiers. With fewer components, the cost and weight of the vehicle can be substantially reduced."

The concept of adding more intelligence at the antenna end sounds similar to what is being done by Q-Free for the second-generation CVIS antenna.

Mobility 2.0

Recent video giving an introduction to the use of the CVIS-project platform as well as a more detailed view of the intelligent freight loading/unloading application in London. The CVIS "AppStore" concept seems to be gaining traction :)

CVIS + CERES collaboration report

For the past few years the Cooperative Vehicle-Infrastructure Systems (CVIS) project has been working to enable vehicles to talk to each other and to infrastructure in order to enable safer, greener and more fun transportation. In parallel our lab at Halmstad University has been working towards the same goals within the Vehicle Alert System (VAS) project. As CVIS nears its end we summarized our work together in a report which is now available from the CVIS website.

"Parallel activities bring CVIS results closer to deployment

We have received the final report on the collaboration activities between CERES/VAS and CVIS, one of the 14 projects we are cooperating (or currently discussing cooperation) with: CVIS grants use of CVIS Reference Execution Platform, Core Software and CVIS Software Developers’ Kit in exchange for external testing and evaluation (see Third Party Cooperation section of this website).

In March 2007, an agreement was made for interchange of experiences between CVIS and the Centre for Research on Embedded Systems (CERES) at Halmstad University in Sweden. The majority of the work relating to this collaboration has been conducted within the CERES project Vehicle Alert System (VAS), aiming to use vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications to provide different types of warning messages. The main focus of the VAS project is on communication and in particular the lower layers of the communication stack are investigated."

First price in the CVIS Application Innovation Contest

In an earlier post I mentioned that we were entering the CVIS Application Innovation Contest. It turned out that we made it through all the way to the finals at the ITS World Congress in Stockholm 21-25 September.

At the congress we displayed and explained our contribution, a cooperative pedestrian warning application, together with the three other finalists. It was up to the visitors to vote for the application they favored the most. And we ended up winning!

In addition to the honor of being voted as the winner by colleagues from the ITS community a cash price of €25.000 was also at stake. Read more about the competition at the CVIS website, a Swedish press-release is available here, Swedish radio have also covered it.

The four finalists during the price ceremony

On the road

Performing real-world experiments often takes significantly more time than just thinking about them from the ivory tower. At the same time the amount and things you learn can be great, it's not just the results of your experiments but also the process of setting them up.

This weekend we took one of the CVIS systems for a test drive to collect data for a demonstrator we're developing. Besides the data we got, which will really help to test our code, we also learned (or were reminded of) the following:

• Turning off the ignition after half an hour of data recording will cut the power from the 12V socket, effectively messing up your measurements (yes we should get some form of UPS)
• Turn on compression when recording video since the recording software doesn't handle files larger than 2GB
• People at bus stops start to stare the 10th time you drive by, stopping for invisible pedestrians.

We used two neodymium magnets to attach the antenna to the roof and a basic webcam to get some context for our recordings.

CVIS Application Contest

The European Integrated Project (IP) Cooperative Vehicle-Infrastructure Systems (CVIS) is arranging a competition to stir up some interest in their software and hardware architecture.

From the announcement:

"The purpose of this contest is to make the ITS community aware of the CVIS concept and demonstrate its possibilities by selecting the most promising applications and support the contest-winning teams to develop and demonstrate their applications in a cooperative systems test bed in Germany, France, Italy, UK, Sweden, Netherlands and Belgium."

Competitors will have to make it through three stages and winners will be announced at the ITS World Congress in Stockholm this year.

We, the VAS project team at HH will of course participate!