IVECO Conducts 4-Vehicle Platooning Pilot In Conjunction With C-Roads Italy

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IVECO’s pilot trucks communicated with each other and the connected infrastructure, providing a glimpse into a future integration of autonomous vehicles and a smart infrastructure. (Photo courtesy of IVECO.)

The Brenner Motorway is home to the C-Roads Italy project, which tests cooperative intelligent transport systems (C-ITS) where vehicles can communicate with each other and the motorway’s connected infrastructure. IVECO recently conducted a four-vehicle platooning pilot with C-ITS combining truck platooning applications with real-world driver alerts for events on the road, including roadwork, traffic congestion, and speed limits.

“The C-Roads Italy project represents an important step on our path to autonomous driving,” says Valerio Liga, IVECO Innovation - Autonomous Driving & Connectivity. “The results of the work we are doing in projects such as this will bring a stream of improvements to our drivers’ comfort and safety, with features that will be able to assist them increasingly effectively.”

Platoon With Vehicle-To-Everything

Truck platooning, where one or more vehicles draft behind a lead truck to improve fuel economy, has the potential to be improved with C-ITS and Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) systems. IVECO’s pilot tested four vehicles driving in a platooning configuration over 300,000 kilometers (186,411 miles) and over 3,500 hours across 29 weeks. In addition to the alerts about road conditions and traffic, IVECO’s tests evaluated truck-passenger cooperation where the system identifies a car intending to enter the truck’s lane and alerts the truck driver.

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Intelligent transport systems on C-Roads Italy can alert drivers to events on the road, including road work ahead. (Photo courtesy of IVECO.)

Favourable Results

Based on the pilot project, IVECO says that platooning functions of C-ITS and V2X are stable enough to analyze the technical feasibility and introduce the technology on future trucks. “The drivers who participated in this pilot have indicated that they would like a feature capable of providing them with the type of information they received during the test,” Liga says. “This type of information exchange between connected vehicles and smart roads will be key to achieving autonomous driving.”

The next step for IVECO will be to perform a cross-border test with trucks traveling from Italy to Austria, so IVECO can demonstrate C-ITS interoperability among European countries.

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Source: IVECO