ESCAPE is born, Europe’s automated driving response

The future of the autonomous driving is “made-in-Europe”. The European Agency for the global navigation satellite systems (GSA) has kicked-off ESCAPE, a three-year and 5.4 M€ project to exploit the services offered by Galileo, the European satellite navigation system, in the field of the automated driving. ESCAPE will coordinate some of the most relevant industrial and research institutions in Europe to create a positioning engine for safety-critical applications on the road, namely- the applications involving highly automated driving.

ESCAPE (European Safety Critical Applications Positioning Engine) is led by the Spanish company FICOSA in collaboration with partners from across Europe: GMV, Renault, IFSTTAR, STMicroelectronics and Istituto Superiore Mario Boella. All partners are important stakeholders of the value chain in the domain of safety-critical applications for road transportation. By 2019, the ESCAPE consortium will finish the development of an innovative positioning engine tailored to meet the safety requirements expressed by those road transport applications that will involve automation and have the potential to harm or damage people and goods.

GMV has a major technical role in the ESCAPE project. As well as taking on responsibility for technical project management, within development of the ESCAPE GNSS Engine (EGE), GMV will also be producing the algorithms that will process the measurements from the vehicle sensors, the cameras and the GNSS receiver to provide the positioning service along with the integrity required by the connected autonomous vehicle. GMV will also be supplying the intermediate fusion layer that will be in charge of binding all the communication components together into a synchronized, well-oiled system.

ESCAPE will set a new paradigm among and across the technologies enabling road vehicle automation, following the vision of the companies that joined the project.

ESCAPE has been funded under the Fundamental Elements programme of the GSA, a new EU R&D funding mechanism supporting the development of EGNSS-enabled chipsets, receivers and antennas, with the major objectives of facilitating the adoption of the European GNSS Systems and improving the competitiveness of the EU industry, by addressing specific user needs in priority market segments.

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