Digital Twin Tech Targets Vulnerable Road Users

Comms specialist, the Anritsu Corporation, has joined a collaboration to develop a digital twin simulator aiming to protect vulnerable road uses including pedestrians and cyclists.

It has joined with autonomous driving simulator company, dSPACE, to demonstrate new technology demonstrated this week at the 5G Automotive Association (5GAA) event in Detroit, MI. The tech employs C-V2X 5G network for cooperative communications in a bid to prevent accidents among vulnerable road users.

Protection for these groups is being developed for roads and intersections to ensure safety and improve accident prevention. As a technology to support this, there has been direct detection of vulnerable users by installing advanced driver ADAS sensors in vehicles.

The 5GAA has been investigating accident prevention methods by the use of 5G-network-based communication, which is based on cooperative communications to and from vulnerable users.

Unlike in-vehicle-based methods, it is expected that protection in blind spots (such as outside the effective detection range of vehicle-mounted sensors and building shadows) will also be possible via 5G network communication.

However, to achieve this, the 5G communication to cooperating vulnerable users must be reliable and the evaluation of quality-of-service management and fault tolerance at the IP address layer is seen as a critical factor.

The demo solution provides a digital twin environment for real-world scenarios, so protection testing can be started virtually when features are not yet available on the real vehicle. Anritsu says it will continue to develop this solution to improve the protection of vulnerable road users and contribute to the development of smart cities by setting up an advanced simulation environment using digital twins.

As with previous attempts to protect vulnerable road users, the systems being explored rely on V2X data messages generated by communication devices, such as smartphones, carried by vulnerable road users.

On top of this, it will use sensor information from intersection cameras which will transmit to a vehicle’s device that displays vulnerable user protection results on the vehicle side via 5G communication through Anritsu's 5G base station simulator.

Maxime Flament, CTO of the 5GAA, says: “Today almost 40% of fatalities on the road are people outside the vehicles: pedestrians, cyclists, road workers, children and more. It is a priority for the 5GAA members to leverage C-V2X technologies to protect these Vulnerable Road Users. This Digital Twin technology demonstration shows how C-V2X communications can offer this great societal opportunity.”