Analysis

PRORETA 3: Continental and TU Darmstadt Join Forces for Research into Safe City Driving

15th March 2011
ES Admin
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The third stage of PRORETA has begun, with Continental and Darmstadt Technical University signing an agreement for joint research into an advanced driver assistance system for city driving.
As part of the PRORETA 3 project, Continental has once again set itself a highly ambitious target in collaboration with the institutes for automotive engineering, ergonomics, control theory & robotics, and control engineering & mechatronics at Darmstadt Technical University (TU Darmstadt): Over the next three and a half years, they intend to develop an integrated concept of an innovative system for driving safety and advanced driver assistance aimed at avoiding accidents and mitigating the consequences of accidents in city traffic. The system will be incorporated into a Continental research vehicle.

What features does a safety system need to be able to recognize the sudden appearance of a hazard and to initiate active assistance measures, such as steering and braking intervention? How can it be designed in such a way that drivers will accept the technology? The PRORETA project, which begins today, is investigating such issues, which are crucial to the series development of advanced driver assistance systems and their components. This third stage of PRORETA will examine ways of assisting drivers faced with demanding, often complex situations in city traffic at relatively moderate speeds. The system to be developed, which takes the results of PRORETA 1 and 2 a step further, requires more powerful functions for perceiving vehicle surroundings and interpreting the situation. It also calls for very complex human-machine interaction that is designed to win the approval of drivers. The first collaborative PRORETA research project (2002-2006) examined emergency braking and emergency steer assistance when traffic ahead is moving or stationary. In the second stage (2006-2009), overtaking assistance for avoiding accidents with oncoming traffic was investigated.

Named after the Roman watchmen on ships who warned of shallow waters, PRORETA is pursuing multiple objectives: The specific tasks that make up PRORETA are designed to encourage and step up the sharing of knowledge between industry and university research departments, instill a sense of enthusiasm for science in young people, and look for solutions to real-life problems from the early stages of research. In this way, PRORETA will also help strengthen German industry, explained Dr. Peter E. Rieth, Senior Vice President of Systems & Technology in the Chassis & Safety Division at Continental.

Long-standing collaboration between industry and academia
Darmstadt Technical University and Continental's Chassis & Safety Division have been working in partnership for many years. The first joint research project carried out with the automotive engineering faculty began back in the 1980s. Projects such as PRORETA are important to us because they enable our students to conduct exciting research in close cooperation with companies in industry, emphasized Professor Hermann Winner, head of the automotive engineering faculty at TU Darmstadt and the PRORETA 3 project manager. He is working on the project alongside Professor Ulrich Konigorski, head of the control engineering & mechatronics faculty, Professor Jürgen Adamy, head of the control theory & robotics faculty, and Professor Ralph Bruder, head of the Institute of Ergonomics. Spelling out Continental's aims, Dr. Rieth said: We believe that it is one of our company's duties to strengthen cooperation between universities and industry and to introduce students and research associates as early as possible to industry-related development issues. We want to make a positive contribution in this area. It helps us make progress with our ContiGuard® safety system and to advance our vision of road traffic without fatal or serious injuries.

ContiGuard® integrates active and passive safety systems and environmental data into a comprehensive vehicle safety system, whose overall effectiveness significantly exceeds the sum of its individual sub-systems. This will considerably increase the potential for preventing accidents and for reducing injuries caused by accidents.


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