ESCAPE takes on a new test campaign

From 15 to 19 October the labs of Université de Technologie de Compiègne (UTC) in France hosted a new integration test campaign of the ESCAPE project (European Safety Critical Applications Positioning Engine).

ESCAPE, funded by the European GNSS Agency (GSA), aims to exploit the services offered by Galileo, Europe’s satellite-navigation system, for the purposes of autonomous driving. Led by the Spanish company FICOSA, ESCAPE brings together some of Europe’s top industrial and research institutions to create a positioning engine for automotive safety-critical applications, i.e., applications involved in highly automated driving.

GMV is playing an important technical role in the ESCAPE project. It not only holds responsibility for technical project management but also, as part of the development of the ESCAPE GNSS Engine (EGE), GMV will be supplying the algorithms to process the readings of the vehicle sensors, the cameras and GNSS receiver, in order to provide the positioning service together with the integrity required by the connected autonomous vehicle. It will also be providing the intermediate data-fusion layer software, in charge of binding all the communication components together into a synchronized, well-oiled system.

During the 5-day campaign the teams of FICOSA, GMV and Renault put their heads together with UTC scientists to conduct a new and comprehensive series of tests on the platform’s new algorithm versions, while also trying out the new camera model to be used on the final platform and also the final vehicle sensors.

Both this campaign and the earlier July campaign are crucial in the development and upgrading of the project, exposing the prototype EGE to diverse real operational conditions, including static and dynamic vehicle, open sky, suburban and urban scenarios.

At the moment, after the functional tests, project engineers are now making a complete analysis of results and the performance obtained with the test vehicle.