Urban Cycling and Automated Vehicles (Rad-Auto-nom Project)

Autonomous vehicles are going to transform the peaceful coexistence of means of transport in urban areas. This development hat multiple effects on participants of the urban transport and the city itself. Overall, four trends can be observed: an increasing autonomous traffic in cities, a growing bicycle traffic due to adapted planning and social development, a revival of the living city and a technical upgrade of the vehicle fleet. These trends necessitate new concepts of planning and technic. This is where the research projects comes in. Project goals and contents: The goal of the project is to investigate and develop solutions for the coming challenges of bicycle traffic in cities in interaction with autonomous vehicles. In doing so, concerns of transport, urbanistic and technic are taken into account. Essential components are transport-related methods as surveys and test drives to recognize and avoid conflicts between bicycles and autonomous vehicles, urbanistic concepts to design cycle paths in urban areas with autonomous vehicles, technical systems in autonomous vehicles based machine learning to detect and predict movements of bicycles and algorithm development to track and predict trajectories of bicycles in urban infrastructure. Aspired project outcomes: Within the scope of the research project, the following outcomes are aspired. Based on the survey outcomes, recommendations to recognize and avoid conflicts are given. The survey outcomes themselves are also essential results of the project. Furthermore, a guideline for traffic an urban planning will be developed. The algorithm to track and predict trajectories of bicycle movements as well as the technical systems in autonomous to detect and track bicycles vehicles will be other important project outcomes. Target groups are planning and engineering offices as well as road construction and urban planning offices, vehicle constructors and startups. Present state of affairs: At the current state, different scenarios for interactions of bicycles with autonomous vehicles are developed and discussed in a project related advisory board. Based on the conclusions, the online survey was designed and completed. The survey is currently in an evaluation process. The outcomes of the survey evaluation will be presented on the ERES conference. Also different scenarios for urban design of bicycle paths are investigated and can be presented and discussed. The suitability of different road types for traffic with cyclists and autonomous vehicles is another important result. Furthermore, the algorithm to detect and track bicycles and other participants in traffic is created. First results of tests with the developed algorithm can be presented as well.