The Safe Road Trains for the Environment (SARTRE) project aims to develop, test and validate technology for vehicles that can drive themselves in long road trains on motorways and demonstrate road train technologies enabling improvements in traffic flow and faster journey times, offering greater comfort to drivers, reducing accidents, improving fuel consumption and hence lowering CO2 emissions. The project has now released a documentary film (8 minutes) that describes the progress of this multi-partner research initiative.
Most of the first year has been taken up by the concept phase which has involved the seven partner consortium investigating the basic principles of a feasible platooning system. In addition to providing some highly thought-provoking and useful results in its own right, this essential groundwork has enabled the team to move on to the start of the implementation phase which will see the start of vehicle testing.
In the 8 minute documentary film a range of interviews are provided by key participants and stakeholders in the project. In addition to describing the SARTRE concept in detail, the film shows some of the simulator based testing done so far.
In addition to releasing the documentary film, the partners have also published three technical papers covering specific details of the work in the concept phase at the ITS World Congress which was held in October at Busan, Korea.
Notes: The SARTRE project stands for Safe Road Trains for the Environment. Part-funded by the European Commission under the Framework 7 programme and a three year project started during 2009, SARTRE is led by Ricardo UK Ltd and comprises a collaboration between the following additional participating companies: Idiada and Robotiker-Tecnalia of Spain, Institut für Kraftfahrwesen Aachen (IKA) of Germany, and SP Technical Research Institute of Sweden, Volvo Car Corporation and Volvo Technology Corporation.
For further information, please contact Erik Nordin, Development Engineer and SARTRE project leader at Volvo Technology Corporation. Phone +46 31 3225429 or e-mail Erik.Nordin@volvo.com.
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