Presentation

In many urban environments, the usage of the private automobile has led to severe problems with respect of pollution, noise, safety and general degradation of the quality of life. Alternative solutions to the private automobile with the same flexibility now appear with a new concept of mobility : the automobile is part of the public transportation system and is used as a complement to mass transit and non-motorised transportation.

These concepts of new mobility using the advantages of the automobile but in the form of a public system have started with car-sharing : a small fleet of cars is shared among a large number of users. First available on a very limited basis, these systems have been extended to several cities in Switzerland and the possibility to get a car at both ends of a trip by train. This concept, very popular now in Switzerland and in Germany with several thousands of regular users is being extended with modern fleet management technologies in order to allow also very small trips and no need to return the car to its point of origin (projects Praxitèle and Liselec in France).

However, these system work well only in specific areas where the demand is properly structured. Furthermore, they do not offer a door to door service : the vehicles are only available at a few locations, and they have to be returned to these location.

A new form of vehicle-sharing is now appearing with a new type of vehicle : the automated vehicle. These vehicles have automated driving capabilities on an existing road infrastructure where they just need a right of way, such as a dedicated bus-lane. Of course, with the existing technologies, the speed of these vehicles is limited at around 30 km/h but this is quite sufficient in many urban environments and the technology, as well as the infrastructures (with dedicated high speed sections) will certainly evolve. Some of these vehicles can also allow for traditional manual driving in order to run among normal traffic. In these cases, the vehicles are called dual-mode and their automated capabilities allow them to be put in platoons, for example in order to collect them.

Eventually, this concept of dual mode vehicle which runs automatically in certain urban environment, could be applied to private vehicle which would then be allowed (with possibly some restrictions and certainly with an access fee), to have access to these restricted areas. This is not a backward step in returning to the existing situation since these private vehicles would certainly run with clean fuels in these situations, be controlled in speed and in parking, would pay for the access right and could park automatically (underground or remote locations) when not in use.

Several companies and research organizations have been involved in the last ten years in the development of these new vehicles which we will call CyberCars. The first systems based on these vehicles have been put in operation in the Netherlands at the end of 1997 and have been running successfully 24 hours a day since then. Several other systems are being implemented right now in Europe which seems to be leading the world into this technology, although similar techniques are also experimented with in Japan and in the USA.

The objective of the project CyberCar is to bring all the European actors of this field together in order to test and exchange best practices, share some of the development work and progress faster in the experiments. Several cities throughout Europe have already accepted to participate in the project and will study with the partners of the project the potentiality to run such systems and give their specific constraints. A major part of the work carried during the project, will be the development and test of several key technologies for the enhancement of the existing systems. These technologies concern better guidance, better collision avoidance, better energy management, better fleet management and the development of simple and standard user interfaces. Cooperative work is also needed at the European level in order to reach a consensus on the certification techniques of these systems which are now developed in a very imprecise regulatory framework.

One of the partners is installing on its ground an experimental system consisting of half a dozen of available automated vehicles in order to test various technologies in a realistic environment with users from the organization. The test ground consists of a network of roads of more than one kilometer. This network is shared with pedestrians and a few ordinary cars. The installation of this network and the vehicles, which should be completed by the first half of 2001, is already financed and is not part of this proposal.

Description of the system

The arm of automatic recharging can be installed in any type of Cybercars, positioned on the side or on the roof of the vehicle. An area of contacts without potential is placed at the end of the arm. When the car is moving the arm is retracted into the body of the car and will come out automatically of its housing when approaching the recharging pole.

The recharging pole is placed on the side of the lane in the chosen area. It also has an area of contacts without potential and a light signal, lighted when connection is made. This recharging pole is constantly connected to the electric grid, but will only deliver the energy when the contacts of the arm are connected to its own contacts.

When the transfer of energy is over, the arm will automatically be removed from the recharging pole and the Cybercar can go on its way.