From 9 to 13 July the Université de Technologie de Compiègne (UTC) in France hosted the integration tests of the ESCAPE project (European Safety Critical Applications Positioning Engine).

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

GMV boasts an important technical role in the ESCAPE project. As well as responsibility for technical management of the project, within the development of the EGE positioning engine (ESCAPE GNSS Engine), GMV is also furnishing the algorithms that will process the readings of the vehicle sensors, the cameras and GNSS receiver 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.

For a five-day period the teams of FICOSA, GMV and Renault put their heads together with UTC scientists to carry out a complete series of tests on the software and hardware interfaces of the prototype EGE positioning engine. During these tests the EGE positioning engine was fitted on a Renault ZOE and then exposed to diverse operational conditions, including static and dynamic vehicle, open sky, suburban and urban scenarios.

The results of these tests represent a real milestone in the project and will be fundamental for improving and upgrading the prototype.