VRU safety standards maturation and interoperability testing

This project will partner with the SAE VRU Safety Consortium to ensure existing standards (i.e., Basic Safety Message, Pedestrian Safety Message) meet VRU safety needs and facilitate technology adoption by industry players. The SAE VRU Safety Consortium was established in 2021 to focus on safety between cars and other road users. It is an industry consortium consisting of car manufacturers (Ford, GM, Nissan), vehicle operators (Lyft), bicycle companies (Shimano, Specialized, TREK, Tome, SRAM), and suppliers (Bosch, Qualcomm, PSS). Through this work, initial virtual distributed interoperability testing will be conducted. This project’s interoperability testing will first focus on enabling standard message exchanges between cars and bicycles and will also explore other types of standards to improve safety among roadway users, including potentially through VRU light flashing frequencies and non-RF signals, to improve object tracking and trajectory prediction by infrastructure- and vehicle-based sensing systems. By maturing these standards, automated vehicles will have access to applications that address VRU safety.

Overall, this project seeks to accelerate industry interoperability and deployment of an ITS technology to improve safety for all road users. It also will be another compelling use case for collaborative distributed testing, which is new to transportation, and strengthens partnerships with the private sector and SDOs to achieve public good outcomes. As such, this project will leverage inputs and insights from ongoing ITS and interoperable connectivity architecture and standards projects (including SAE’s VRU standards and ITE’s multimodal and accessibility transportation standards), ITSUS results, and other ITS projects plus deployer experiences with demonstrations of VRU applications. In addition, results of this project will inform SAE with regard to the development and maturation of standards underway.
 

• TBD