5G-Safe project developing road weather services based on vehicle data

VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland is coordinating the 5G-Safe project, which is part of Tekes’ Challenge Finland competition. It is focused on the identification of local weather and road conditions on the basis of data collected from vehicles, and the sending of warnings to road users. In addition, real-time video and radar data will be exchanged between passing vehicles. Other issues being investigated include the use of data on local road weather conditions to improve the situational awareness of
April 21, 2017 Read time: 2 mins
814 VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland is coordinating the 5G-Safe project, which is part of Tekes’ Challenge Finland competition. It is focused on the identification of local weather and road conditions on the basis of data collected from vehicles, and the sending of warnings to road users. In addition, real-time video and radar data will be exchanged between passing vehicles.


Other issues being investigated include the use of data on local road weather conditions to improve the situational awareness of autonomous vehicles and the enhancement of autonomous operation in harsh weather.

The services currently being developed require no action during driving in order to send data or warnings. Instead, the prevailing local weather and road conditions are automatically identified based on data collected from vehicles. Warnings and other useful information are sent in real-time to road users, road operators and autonomous vehicle control systems. The new network and cloud computing technologies being researched under the project aim to reduce delays in data exchange and be more scalable than current services.

According to Tiia Ojanperä, a project manager from VTT, the wide introduction of real-time services, based on sensor and video data collected from vehicles, is being made possible by next-generation 5G mobile network technology and new solutions supporting optimal data collection and exchange.

As an example, he says 5G will form the cornerstone of interaction between autonomous cars. Contemporary driver support systems are mainly vision-based, relying on signals generated by the vehicle’s sensors. 5G and short-range radios will also bring the power of speech and hearing to vehicles, taking their capabilities to a new level, he claims.

Location Based Systems

Related Content

  • Detection analysis technology successfully predicts traffic flows
    February 3, 2012
    David Crawford investigates new detection analysis technology from IBM. Locations on both the East and West Coasts of the US are scheduled for early deployments of IBM's new Traffic Prediction Tool (TPT) statistical analysis model for the fine-time resolution and near-term prediction of road flow conditions. Developed by IBM's Watson Research Laboratories, TPT is designed to analyse data from the the key detection indicators - average vehicle volumes and speeds passing a location in a given time interval -
    Read More
  • Hard data supports traffic monitoring
    April 30, 2024
    A collaboration between AGD Systems and North Line Canada has demonstrated the value of traffic experts putting their heads together to improve pedestrian safety
    Read More
  • AVT cameras, part of a new generation of ETC
    August 20, 2015
    Allied Vision Technologies (AVT) has supplied Norwegian company Q-Free with its high performance machine vision cameras for use in electronic toll collection (ETC) systems. Q-Free has developed an ETC installation based on a single gantry which relies on the latest machine imaging systems, radio systems and automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) software technologies to collect toll data. This versatile system is designed to do pure video tolling or a combination of video and radio tolling depending
    Read More
  • Getting C/AVs from pipedream to reality
    October 17, 2019
    The UK government has suggested that driverless cars could be on the roads by 2021. But designers and engineers are grappling with a number of difficult issues, muses Chris Hayhurst of MathWorks Earlier this year, the UK government made the bold statement that by 2021, driverless cars will be on the UK’s roads. But is this an achievable reality? Driverless technology already has its use cases on our roads, with levels of autonomy ranked on a scale. At one end of the spectrum, level 1 is defined by th
    Read More

Highlighted Content