Section: New Results

Legislation and certification of fully automated road vehicles for urban public transport

Participant : Michel Parent.

An important research area of automated road vehicles and one of the focuses of the CityMobil2 Project is to look at the legislation and certification of fully automated road vehicles for urban public transport (the cybercars). This part of the research was done essentially by Michel Parent in 2014 and gave birth to several CityMobil2 deliverables.

One of the tasks was to identify the current legislation in France and the organizations involved in the changes for this legislation. Several meetings were therefore organized at the French level with key persons from the Ministry of Transport, the Ministry of Interior (responsible for the road legislation) and their services (in particular the SRMTG in charge of certifying the guided transport systems). These meetings were essential in obtaining the authorization to operate the cybercars for the demonstration in La Rochelle. At the European level, a meeting was organized in May 2014 with representatives of 12 of the European countries (mostly those involved directly with CityMobil2 or with automated vehicles R&D).

Another task was to propose a certification methodology for automated road transport systems. For this task, a careful analysis of the test site in La Rochelle was conducted and led to a number of use cases. Key elements were defined to perform the risk analysis. Many hazards were identified but the most important ones are the behavior of pedestrian and cyclists. For the analysis, two key variables were defined: the minimum mobile object detection distance (MMODD) and the maximum mobile object speed (MMOS). For each use case, a combination of these 2 variable lead to a maximum vehicle speed in order to reach an acceptable risk evaluated as a combination of severity and probability.

In order to verify the proper behavior of the vehicle itself (lane tracking, obstacle avoidance, comfort,…), a number of standard tests have also been defined and are now proposed at the International level (ISO standards).