MEDUSA: Engineering technology network applied to the development of intelligent solutions for human-centred autonomous driving.
Europe's future transport and mobility system must overcome major technical research and innovation challenges, as tomorrow's highly automated vehicles will be based on advanced 'sense-think-act' solutions, enabling safe interaction with all road users. This scenario calls for the integrated development of safe and reliable technologies based on digital instrumentation for autonomous and connected driving, accompanied by the integration of people, virtual validation processes and demonstration of these technologies, which will also enable the promotion, dynamisation and transfer of knowledge and results to the automotive, mobility and institutional sectors and new stakeholders.
In this context, the main objective of MEDUSA is the collaborative development of the necessary capabilities and technologies for safe and inclusive autonomous driving through sensorisation and intelligent communication, where information from multiple sources is efficiently merged, placing people at the centre of the technology. This objective is articulated around four main lines of R&D, including:
- Integration and human involvement in the design of autonomous driving systems,
- intelligent sensorisation and safe navigation,
- design and development of reliable and secure HW/SW platforms and
- advanced V2X network data integration and management and reinforcement of the paradigm of shared data spaces in Intelligent Mobility.
All these lines converge in the objective of a safe and acceptable implementation of autonomous driving, transferring the knowledge and innovation generated both to the automotive sector and to the emerging technological actors in the new mobility ecosystem.
CTIC's technical objectives in this project encompass several knowledge units and challenges, including the definition of robust and efficient communication protocols in the V2X ecosystem, the development of interoperability components with V2X data sources or open data sources to optimise the situational awareness of the autonomous vehicle, the modelling of an Intelligent Mobility Data Space to replicate and analyse interactions between vehicles, the design and use of methods and techniques for fusion and optimisation of understanding and confidence in imprecise contexts to improve the explainability of autonomous vehicles and the design of advanced immersive interfaces for monitoring and optimising information management to provide evidence of human-machine interaction.
