The Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge (GCDC), a cooperative and automated driving competition among various European universities and research centres.
Last 27th and 28th of May, the Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge (GCDC), a cooperative and
automated driving competition among various European universities and research centres took place in Helmond (The Netherlands). The winner of the GCDC should not be the most robust or resilient, but the most cooperative — the one best able to support the rest of the competing teams to perform the interactions in the three defined scenarios:
- The merge of two vehicle platoons when lane is closed ahead due to roadworks
- A smart intersection in which the vehicles coordinate their speeds in order to increase energy efficiency and traffic flow
- A demo scenario in which the vehicles coordinate themselves to allow an emergency vehicle to overtake.
After hard preparation and a tough competition, the Halmstad University team (Sweden) was proclaimed champion of the GCDC 2016 The GCDC has been organized under the iGAME Project framework, funded by the EC and coordinated by TNO, with Applus IDIADA, Technical University of Eindhoven (TuE) and Viktoria ICT University (Sweden) as consortium members. Applus IDIADA has had the chance to define the extension of current C-ITS standards according to the requirements set by the scenarios and taking into account the challenges of cooperative and automated driving. Furthermore, as leaders of the WP devoted to
safety, IDIADA has overviewed the safety rules during the project and in the GCDC: from the definition of (functional) safety requirements to the safety assessment of the teams, a real challenge as we had to validate multi-brand vehicles in which each team had followed different design choices