The European Commission’s EU Research Results platform CORDIS has published a feature on the SAFE-UP project.

In a bid to empower all road users, the SAFE-UP project has launched its e-Learning Platform. The platform has been designed to raise awareness among all individuals interested in the SAFE-UP project and its outcomes, regardless of their technical expertise. Leveraging the expertise of the project's team, the eLearning courses offer a wealth of knowledge translated into easily digestible content, ensuring that users can navigate the intricacies of future traffic scenarios seamlessly. The platform is a product of tireless efforts in knowledge translation carried out within the project.

The SAFE-UP project, with its ambition to make future mobility safer for both occupants and pedestrians, held its final project conference last month on May 17th at the headquarters of lead partner Applus+ IDIADA in Spain. The event brought together around 50 participants, including researchers, policymakers, automotive experts, and road safety enthusiasts, who witnessed the project's remarkable advancements in active and passive safety systems for autonomous vehicles.

Work package 2 focuses on improving simulation tools to understand the impact of automated vehicles. In order to do so, metrics are being developed to identify safety-critical interactions and assess their severity. Typically, critical interactions are identified by applying specific thresholds to the measures of vehicle separation, such as space, time, or speed. While Deliverable 2.5 reviewed the literature on the topic and identified the further development necessary for the project, Deliverable 2.14 presents the defined metrics and their use.

On May 17th 2023, join researchers, policymakers, automotive experts and road safety enthusiasts at Applus+ IDIADA for a showcase of SAFE-UP’s final demonstrators, and gain insights from the experts behind the project.

SAFE-UP Deliverable 2.4 focuses on the necessary steps in developing a simulation environment that can model future safety-critical scenarios involving fully autonomous vehicles (AVs). A traffic simulation environment attempts to represent what could happen in a scenario that cannot be tested in real-life conditions – either because it is not yet feasible or too costly. In general, the models included in simulation environments are collision-free by design, which is quite the obstacle when studying potential (new) crash scenarios.

Lisa Spellman, Director of the VRU Safety Consortium stresses the importance of having a common vision and mission with organisations committed to improving shared road user safety.

On January 25th 2023, at the 5th SAFE-UP General Assembly, Dr. Marilee Nugent of UNIFI led a WP6 workshop on Knowledge Translation for Road Safety Innovation with special guest speaker Dr. Tamika Heiden, the principal and founder of Research Impact Academy, Australia.

Join us in Lisbon from the 14th-17th of November for SAFE-UP’s first-ever public vehicle demonstration at the 2022 Transport Research Arena (TRA).

Back in July, our WP3 partners held an integration week at the Bosch proving ground in Boxberg, Germany. The main objective of this meeting was to integrate and test the newest (and close-to-final) version of all Demo 3 algorithms in one of the relevant SAFE-UP Demo 3 scenarios.

Recently we chatted with the technical manager for ADAS and automated driving at Euro NCAP, Adriano Palao, ahead of the release of the Euro NCAP 2030 roadmap. Hear his thoughts on the programme’s vision for future vehicle safety in Europe and how SAFE-UP's innovations support their work.

SAFE-UP is developing innovative passive and active safety systems with the help of 4 demonstrator vehicles. These new technologies aim to improve specific safety-critical scenarios with the goal of reducing fatalities and injuries - in line with the European Union’s Vision Zero. In order to claim that a safety system is effective, testing activities (both physical and virtual) within SAFE-UP are recreating existing safety-critical scenarios and analysing the impact of introducing these new systems.

Between the 5th and 7th of April, Thessaloniki welcomed the entire SAFE-UP consortium for the first-ever face-to-face General Assembly (GA). This time, our Greek partner HIT-CERTH hosted the three-day event at their facilities. This news item summarises some of the key developments and milestones revealed during the GA.

SAFE-UP’s 4 demonstrators are set to collectively prevent 2.5 - 4.15% of road transport fatalities and 5.9 - 9.9% of serious injuries by 2025. These figures are proportional to the market deployment and adoption of our solutions, preventing up to 32.6% of road transport fatalities and 69.3% of serious injuries by 2050.

Jason R. Kerrigan of the University of Virginia (UVA)’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering shares his thoughts on how we can keep passengers of autonomous vehicles safe in new seating positions, as being explored, developed and demonstrated in SAFE-UP demo 1, through Occupant monitoring system (OMS) and sled testing activities.

Last October, during the ITS World Congress in Hamburg, four partners from the SAFE-UP consortium had the opportunity to participate in a panel session alongside European Commission representative Claire Depré. 

SAFE-UP researchers have published an infographic based on an updated analysis of the CARE database for general statistics on car-to-VRU crashes in the EU, mainly in urban areas.

Antonio Avenoso, Executive Director of the European Transport Safety Council reflects on new EU road death data, the need to do more to protect vulnerable road users, and the potential for research like the SAFE-UP project to contribute to this need.

Two weeks ago, Barcelona provided a fitting setting for the first face-to-face meeting of SAFE-UP, after almost a year and a half since the project kick-off! The 2-day meeting gathered the minds behind SAFE-UP's behavioural simulation models to present their functioning, boundary conditions and how they will be validated.

In this mid-term project update, discover some of the latest research results from the SAFE-UP partners as they explore the potential of Cooperative, Connected and Automated Mobility (CCAM) for better road safety.