TransSec

Autonoms emergency manoeuvring and movement monitoring for road transport security

Aims

The TransSec projects aims at developing a systems for secure road transport. This system will be able to prevent the abuse of trucks and transport of goods, e.g. for terror attacks. Today, the truck driver can easily overrule the safety manoeuvres triggered by current systems. Therefore these systems cannot stop abuse. To prevent intentional crashes, those safety manoevers must be non-defeatable.

Achievements

In TransSec the latest advancements in

• European satellite navigation technology,
• multi-sensor positioning,
• high-definition road mapping,
• environment perception,
• scene understanding and risk prediction, and
• autonomous driving functions

will be combined to extend truck safety systems to a truck security system that cannot only prevent accidents, but also intentional abuse of trucks.

Brief Description

Road transport safety has been in the focus of vehicle and truck development for many years. Today, the leading European truck manufacturers have developed innovative safety systems such as adaptive cruise control, auto­mated emergency braking and lane keeping. These systems are on the market and an increasing number of trucks is equipped with these systems. They cover the most frequent accident causes with heavy trucks.

Recently, trucks have been in the news not because of accidents, but because of terrorist attacks. Even if those trucks misused as weapons would have been equipped with the latest safety systems, the driver could overrule the safety manoeuvres. Therefore, TransSec will implement and demonstrate a truck security system that detects malicious truck behaviour and initiates an autonomous truck manoeuvre, which cannot be stopped by the driver. This requires a comprehensive understanding of the driving scene, its evolution and a risk estimation.

As basis for this new type of system, a robust GNSS-based positioning platform will be developed. In a setting where the positioning component is part of a security system, the security aspect influences the development of the positioning system’s architecture. The whole positioning system has to cope with deliberate attacks that aim at circumventing the security system. The threads of spoofing, jamming and other types of sensor data manipulation will be taken into account from the very beginning of the project. One particular goal of the project is to benefit from Galileo’s unique signal authentication capabilities for detecting spoofing attacks.

For enhancing the GNSS positioning TransSec will make use of sensor data fusion. This will help to bridge GNSS gaps and improve the overall quality of the navigation solution. Image-based navigation techniques will be employed for overcoming the problems of low-cost inertial sensors. Making use of several sensors for detecting suspicious sensor data streams, will add a novel aspect to the sensor data fusion. Sensor data fusion, GNSS signal authentication and monitoring, as well as in-system data authentication will be the key for developing a resilient navigation platform.

A fundamental driver of this project is to not only define algorithms and autonomous manoeuvring using sensor data but also to integrate the global solution in real trucks. The objective is to develop a complete and attainable methodology for implementing a safe trucks avoiding their use in terrorist attacks.