Secure Communication Mechanisms for Autonomous Driving Applications
The highway towards fully autonomous driving (AD) is strongly linked to Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-toInfrastructure (V2I) communications, as they can pave the way for cooperative, connected automated mobility services. V2V communications are so far based on IEEE 802.11p, which, despite its simplicity, faces drawbacks, such as high in-vehicle investments, low reliability, interference and stability issues. On the other hand, V2I communications are based on numerous standards (IEEE 802.11n, DSRC, Infrared, 3G/UMTS/HSPA, 4G/LTE), which are associated with high infrastructure costs, as well as high latency (>20msec), prohibiting fast vehicle adaptations.
The vision of ACCELLIGENCE is to invest on the design and validation of secure 5G communication mechanisms as a novel core infrastructure for V2X communications, and an alternative compared to the aforementioned approaches. ACCELLIGENCE aims to contribute on the existing quantifiable evidence, frameworks and tools in order to enable the exploitation of secure communication technologies through the provision of secure data exchange mechanisms between highly automated vehicles (SAE levels > 3), .
SAITU (Smart Flying Unit)
SAITU is a third generation drone, able to lift up to 15 kg of payload. Due to its optimized design, it has an extended flight time of up to 30 minutes, which is a substantial advantage when compared to conventional models currently available in the market, and a high precision localization of 1cm using GPS-RTK2.
SAITU is equipped with a separate onboard computer with a GPU, (CPU: Quad-core ARM A57 @ 1.43 GHz; RAM: 4 GB 64-bit LPDDR4 25.6 GB/s; GPU: 128-core Maxwell) running the latest version of ROS (Melodic).
This configuration is ideal for running complex Artificial Intelligence algorithms, which makes SAITU the ideal drone for complex tasks such as event detection, object detection/counting and collision avoidance.
The flight controller of SAITU is based on the open-source ArduPilot and is wrapped around ROS standard software, being fully integrated with the DDS standard, immediately addressing the needs of thousands of applications that require real-time data exchange, in sectors like precision farming, aerospace and defense, autonomous vehicles, smart grid management, transportation systems, among many others.
SAITU also provides out-of-the-box full integration of ROS with multispectral cameras, and high resolution cameras.
A more advanced configuration of SAITU can be provided including, among other components, a fully integrated gimbal and a RedEdge Multispectral camera, providing a complete system suitable for even the most advanced needs (other components can be added per request).