The Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads is undertaking a Cooperative and Highly Automated Driving (CHAD) Safety Study.
The study will deliver a cooperative and (highly) automated vehicle (CAV) prototype, research platform and local expertise base, to conduct a comprehensive safety study to inform government policy and direction.
This iMOVE project is intended to prepare for the arrival of CAVs with safety, mobility and environmental benefits on Australian roads.
CAVs offer potential to significantly reduce accidents due to human error, however, they also introduce new safety challenges.
This project will provide a core research platform, comprising a Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) Level 4 Electric CAV prototype, which will be used to deliver a safety study that explores a range of CAV impacts and benefits.
Five Work Packages (WP) will lay the technical and human factor foundations for safe introduction of CAVs to Australian roads, providing an evidence-base to support government policy and decision-making and future CAV development by industry.
The study will develop recommendations regarding how to make CAVs and associated infrastructure more resilient to road safety risks, as well as to increase public awareness about CAV to encourage uptake and benefits realisation.
The five work packages are:
- Safety, legal and ethics: prepare on-road permit applications and ethics submissions to support WP1 to 4
- Driving task handover in automated vehicles (AVs): Evaluate safety impacts of handover between the vehicle and driver in complex situations, and develop good practice guidelines for the human machine interface
- C-ITS and AV integration, and benefits evaluation: Design and test AV responses to cooperative intelligent transport system (C-ITS) use cases, and evaluate AV performance improvements and safety benefits
- Australian safety challenges for CAVs in the dynamic road environment: Identify Australian-specific safety-critical (‘risky’) scenarios relating to the interaction of CAVs with other road users; determine potential mitigations and test mitigation for one scenario on-road
- CAV public awareness and demonstrations: Build public understanding and awareness of CAV through public demonstrations, displays and a targeted public awareness campaign
There is also a support package that will look at database management relating to design, build and maintenance of IT infrastructure for data collection and analysis, particularly for WP3 and another of our iMOVE projects, How Automated Vehicles will Interact with Road Infrastructure Now and in the Future.
