Ford studies robot telematics with Russian university
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Ford has joined hands with the telematics department of St Petersburg Polytechnic University in Russia to study space-based robotic communications systems with potential for developing mesh networks to aid vehicle-to-vehicle communication.
The research furthers the company’s commitment to industry leadership in the development of connected vehicle communication, which has the potential to reduce traffic accidents and ease congestion by enabling vehicles to communicate with each other, and to communicate with buildings, traffic lights, the cloud and other systems to deliver a message or detect and respond to imminent collision warnings.
Paul Mascarenas, chief technical officer and vice president, Ford research and innovation, said participation in this research could aid in the development of next-generation Ford driver-assist technologies. These technologies will globally benefit Ford customers, other road users and the environment.
He cited one promising development as being the advancement in emergency vehicle communication methods. Ford is analysing how emergency messages should be sent to ensure delivery if network failures were to occur, identifying the systems and methods that provide redundancy in case of primary delivery failure.
For example, if an accident were to cause vehicle-to-cloud communications to be broken, a vehicle may still have access to a vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications network. An emergency signal message could potentially be sent through V2V to a vehicle nearby, and then between vehicles and infrastructures until it reached emergency medical services.
The communications blend multiple networking technologies including dedicated short-range communication (DSRC), cellular LTE (long-term evolution) wireless broadband and mesh networking to ensure robust and reliable connectivity for optimum signal strength for critical messages.
An emergency message, for example, may be communicated through the faster mesh network, whereas an entertainment-related message would route through a vehicle-to-infrastructure application, an embedded device or a brought-in device network.
Oleg Gusikhin, technical leader in systems analytics for Ford, said Ford was analysing the data to research which networks are the most robust and reliable for certain types of messages, as well as fall-back options if networks were to fail in a particular scenario.
“In a crash, for example, a vehicle could have the option to communicate an emergency though a DSRC, LTE or a mesh network based on the type of signal, speed and robustness required to reach emergency responders as quickly as possible,” he said.
