Autonomous emergency manoeuvring and movement monitoring for road transport security

The TransSec project addresses a new danger in European countries, the increasing number of terror attacks. Recent terror attacks with trucks in Nice and Berlin have shown drastically the damage a heavy truck can cause, how easy it is to misuse a truck for attacks and that newest safety systems cannot prevent these attacks. As a consequence road transport safety has to be supplemented by road transport security. TransSec aims to initiate the development of this Security Truck.
The project objective is:
Development and evaluation of systems built-in or to be used by trucks for secure road transport of (dangerous) goods.
Preventing trucks and transport of goods to be misused for other purposes such as terror attacks.
Specific objectives are:
• Precise vehicle positioning and navigation on road (lane) and off road
• Vehicle movement monitoring for dangerous goods with critical area alarm/eCall
• Vehicle communication security for critical information exchange
• Onboard precrash environment detection of vulnerable objects on/ off road
• Non-defeatable autonomous emergency manoeuvring for crash prevention on/off road
The implementation is done in an explorative and incremental development cycle with early prototypes adding functionality step by step. Demonstrations with a truck on and off road will show solutions after 12, 24 and 36 months. Testing and pilots on public roads and public areas will prove a higher level of security.

Vicomtech is leading Work Package 4 (WP4), Environment Object Detection, and Work Package 5 (WP5), Vehicle Movement Monitoring. The work in WP4 is focused on detecting the dynamic and static elements of the vehicle surroundings, such as pedestrians or other vehicles. For this purpose, camera and Lidar sensors are used. Then, in WP5, the collision risk associated with each of these potential obstacles is estimated. Vicomtech also takes part in the Integration and Pilot Testing Work Package (WP8).