The paper intends to present goals and experimental results of the ERSEC Project (Enhanced Road Safety by integrating Egnos-Galileo data with on-board Control System), a two-year project funded by the European Commission aiming at broadening the scope of application of the EGNOS/GNSS (and later Galileo) and EDAS systems to road transport, through an appropriate integration and data fusion with measurement data coming from other measuring instruments.
More specifically, the S&T objective of the project is to develop a measuring system - to be used on board of vehicles - able to output the position on the road map of the equipped vehicle and of all the obstacles (such as other vehicles, peoples and any kind of fixed or mobile objects) around it with a measurement accuracy of the order of fraction of metres at a sampling rate of 100 Hz. The proposed approach is based on an intelligent data fusion of the EGNOS/GNSS sensor positioning measurement, the Road-GIS digital local map data and the measurement data obtained from an instrument set installed on board of the vehicle, including vehicle dynamic sensors (tachometer and gyro) and environmental sensors (laser scanner). Beside the hybridization with other sensors, the optimal use of EGNOS (and Galileo in the future) key differentiators (accuracy, integrity) represents a key factor for the application, allowing the improvement of the performance of active road safety systems aimed to avoid collision and off road accidents.
The paper introduces the project objectives and focuses on the used methodological approach. Then the project results are presented, obtained with an experimental test campaign on field.