The digitalisation of transport is a far-reaching effort to minimize road fatalities and injuries, while paving the way for cooperative transport and the spread of higher driver assistance or self-driving methods. But it is also worth looking at the immediate societal benefits, with an almost endless list of use cases for connected vehicles. And the way to achieve all of this is greatly simplified by forward-thinking public agencies following a strategy.

Municipalities and regions that take the time to develop transport policies and set standards are better placed to make decisions. If they don’t, a lot of meetings will be needed for each project. That’s one of the benefits of having Commsignia’s V2X Roadside Unit (RSU) on the Approved Product List (APL) in Florida. In order to save time and money, Florida officials centrally review and certify devices, so contractors actually working on projects can simply pick the right one from the approved product list. They can be confident that the equipment will meet minimum requirements and there are no safety concerns. 

Tested traffic signals won’t start flashing for no reason, and we won’t see conflicting vehicles on the road.

States like Florida use a review process for digital traffic technologies primarily because the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD), a 1000-plus page guidebook for planners and road builders, focuses more on paint and plastic. It includes how to set up traffic signs, what’s the standard way to paint lane markings, and how to operate devices such as traffic signals, but only briefly comments on ITS technologies. While dealing with new technologies requires extra efforts from both the road managers and the vendors, that may not always be the case. 

Let’s see how innovations can get to the real streets easier. 

New technologies, which are so novel that they do not yet have generic characteristics and associated quality requirements, are initially approved by the state testing laboratory with a letter of permission. It is then thoroughly tested to see if it really does something that they would like to see adopted on a larger scale. At this point the state authority would make the specification and start the APL process. States have specific requirements. In Florida, for example, Commsignia RSUs must integrate with the SunGuide system used by road managers. 

Finally, mature and widely adopted technologies have the chance to get included in the MUTCD. Have you ever met those rectangular, rapid flashing beacons at midblock crosswalks? That was an idea of a vendor who believed that it will make it easier for drivers to recognize that there’s a pedestrian trying to cross the road, and that it’d make cars slow down. After years of experimentation first they got an interim approval for that device type, and now it is officially in the MUTCD.

If you want to learn more about Commsignia’s V2X roadside infrastructure, get in touch with us!

Laszlo Kaufmann – Business Development Director for Smart City – Central U.S.

Gary Brady – Senior Business Development Manager for Smart City – Eastern U.S.

This year we celebrated the 100th anniversary of the idea that radio communication between cars could make travel safer, which was a bold vision back then. Then later on, as mobile devices became one of the pillars of modern societies, the abundance of affordable radio equipment started to make connected cars a reality in the early 2000s. To mark the centenary, we interviewed a number of global experts who have helped and are still helping to develop the market for connected and cooperating vehicles. In the final episode of the series, we give you a glimpse into the history of Commsignia with CTO and Executive President Laszlo Virag.

Commsignia has been here for more than a decade in the not much longer history of V2X. How did it all start?

My fellow founders and I were working and researching in this area long before Commsignia. The huge EU-funded CVIS project between 2006 and 2010 included more than 60 industry partners and we were working on the software part. It was responsible for selecting the right communication interfaces for each application and providing the seamless handover between the vehicles (vehicle-to-vehicle) and the infrastructure (vehicle-to-infrastructure). There were applications like collision avoidance, map updates and even distributing advertisements on vehicles, and we were using interfaces such as wifi, bluetooth, cellular, DSRC and also infrared communication depending on the situation and the quality of service requirements. We were already working on standardization and defining quality of service at that time.

It was such a ground-breaking architecture that the world is still trying to catch up with it. There was no question then whether Uu [cellular connection] or PC5 [direct connection] was needed, yet it took many years for the industry to come to the point again that these two interfaces are not competing technologies, but complementary.

Although the platform and architecture were there, as researchers we ran into the problem that only large and expensive prototypes existed for implementation. Many articles have talked about why devices cannot be implemented with existing wifi technologies. We saw that many people were stuck with it, but we thought: that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. So we did it. We tweaked existing wifi solutions, and created a simple 802.11p-based solution that we could offer at a very reasonable price. This handcrafted solution is what started things for us: creating electronics, communications software, security components and applications.

What has helped the company grow?

At first, growth was organic, and when we had the capital, we hired our first employees. The real scale-up happened when the industry saw our solution working and wanted to buy not just 5-10 units, but hundreds. It also showed that craftsmanship does not scale. We started to grow the team more aggressively, and as we became involved in more projects, we got to know the V2X automotive market. It required a completely different mindset. It was out of the question for Commsignia to produce the electronics for a million cars, so we agreed to provide the software.

The competition here was quite strong. There were companies in Europe working on similar solutions and three strong competitors in the US, but only one of the latter now exists. They all had traction, a bigger team and a market presence. In many cases we have won customers by not compromising on quality. It was hard to learn that in business, the best doesn’t always win, but good product and customer support pays off in the end. 

One hundred years ago this year, radio communication between cars, the ancestor of V2X, was patented for the first time. To mark the occasion, we asked industry experts how they see the present and what they expect from the future of V2X. In this episode, Gerhard Menzel answers our questions, who has been responsible for building up the European security framework of C-ITS at the European Commission and now the Head of Intelligent Transport Systems at the Federal Ministry for Climate Action, Environment, Energy, Mobility, Innovation and Technology in Austria.

Europe is very much at the forefront of C-ITS. How did the EU get here?

When I was first involved with C-ITS it wasn’t even called C-ITS yet. That was in 2007, when the first EU funded research projects in Europe, CVIS and COOPERS aimed to develop safety services based on on-board units that would enable communication with the infrastructure and between vehicles. The use cases that we developed back then were very similar to what we have now. A lot of research activity was going on, and by 2013-2014, when the terms like C-ITS, V2X, V2I and V2V and other similar acronyms were created, we had very good results. The industry wanted to start deploying, but the European Commission saw that a couple of things were not quite ready yet, a lot of things were missing.

The department for mobility and transport (DG MOVE) wanted to create a new form of cooperation between private and public stakeholders to sort out and lay down what needs to be done to make C-ITS a reality.

You’ve been working on the development of security. Were you building on existing solutions?

I had a bit of an idea what the security system was about, how it should work. We didn’t invent anything, the ingredients were already there: the ETSI standards, the communication stack, the PKI concept of having trusted messages, and how it would be done. But it wasn’t the part we focused on. Although the technology was available, it became clear quite quickly that nowhere in the world had a trust model been defined for how to make this really work from an organizational and governance point of view. Any car brand in any country should have been able to communicate with each other and the infrastructure, but there wasn’t any agreement between the car manufacturers and between the member states on how to make C-ITS interoperable.

What was the most difficult challenge?

Defining a commonly agreed policy on certificates was one of the most difficult tasks. The Commission took on the role of leading the process, but some stakeholders came in with very strong and diverging positions, for instance on security algorithm requirements. In every PKI, the certificate policy must be clearly defined and agreed by all: how many roots there are, who is responsible for them, what the terms are. It didn’t exist yet. We needed a public-private cooperation on this, because otherwise we would have had separate systems in country A and country B, at one car manufacturer and another and so on. This alone took us two years to agree on the certificate policy and write the first version.

This was published by the Commission as results of an expert group and then also in its famous Delegated Regulation on C-ITS, which did not enter into force, but was a very important signal for anyone who would use C-ITS. Regardless of the communications technology debates, it gave certainty on how security works, what the central roles are and that there will be a European PKI maintained. It became clear that we will have more than one root Certificate Authority (CA) in Europe. As a consequence of that, we designed a trust system that ensures that there’s guaranteed interoperability by design between those multiple root CAs. Other regions of the world still don’t have this commitment on how different root CAs will work together.

These six years also include the scaleup phase, the implementation of these rules. The ECTL, the European Certificate Trust List is published, and more and more stakeholders join. We’re on a consistent path: designing the policy, implementing it, and now scaling it up. Everybody wants to be on the list, be trusted and communicate with the fleet of already V2X equipped cars and deployed road infrastructure units, and hopefully soon with even more other V2X entities.

What challenges still lie ahead for Europe?

Although certainty was there in the trust model, legal certainty was not, but this is about to change. Now the big news is that at the end of October the Council adopted the new ITS Directive, which will come into force in a few weeks. It’s all in there: a very clear legal definition of what C-ITS really is, namely a service based on exchanging secured and trusted messages, who’s the C-ITS certificate policy authority, who’s the trust list manager, who’s the C-ITS point of contact, in fact laying it all down in legislation how trust, interoperability and backward compatibility is guaranteed for all C-ITS deployment in the EU.

As for the challenges: we need to stay up to date, we need to keep reviewing the C-ITS certificate and security policy. We cannot relax, because things are changing very fast in cybersecurity. So, the challenge is not to think that everything is already done, but to keep on maintaining and shaping this now established trusted V2X eco-system.

The benefits of light vehicles are attracting more and more people, but the future of micromobility lies in whether cities are able to protect vulnerable road users (VRUs).

Some have switched modes with confidence, but many do not feel comfortable in the current state of transition. Standing on a sheet of metal is not comparable to the safety of a car body.

There is a significant increase in the risk of unintentional road injuries and fatalities

Some cities already have an extensive network of bicycle roads, some are planning to build, others are lagging behind. Whatever the case, people traveling by bicycle or e-scooter will encounter cars during their journey. In the battle of standing on two legs vs two tons of steel, there is no doubt who will be the winner.

There’s a way to increase safety and confidence in diverse traffic. We need to connect all road users with vehicle-to-everything (V2X) technology. Commsignia brought its expertise in V2X and partnered with Spoke to build game-changer  VRU safety solutions.

One of the most common causes of VRU incidents is that the driver of the car doesn’t see the light vehicle coming.

A bicycle or e-scooter can easily go unnoticed in the vehicle’s blind spot. Turning cars can cross the path of a light vehicle passing by them or in the opposite lane, which can lead to an incident with injury. Even an ordinary event like the opening of a car door can also have serious consequences.

Real time V2X communication guarantees that vehicles nearby receive real-time alerts. They will know about each other, even if they don’t see each other, and they can avoid these dangerous situations.

Find out more about the future of micromobility and our VRU protection and bicycle safety solutions by contacting us here.

If anything, we at Commsignia speak V2X – the language of mobility.

It’s easy to take a popular quote out of context and use them in wide variety of topics. These words by Rita Mae Brown have a very different meaning in the business of vehicle communications. We literally use V2X messages to tell where people and their vehicles come from, and where they are going.

How is V2X a language?

Now let’s get to the point. V2X has it’s own mother language defined by international standards, so every single vehicle understands each other. Although we don’t use linguistic prefixes or suffixes, the messages are well structured. Would you like to see one? Fasten your seat belt because we are going fast and very deep.

Take a look below at the beautiful structure of the standard V2X “sentence”, a Traveler Information Message (TIM) that typically contains information about actual traffic situations.

{
  "dtype": "TIM",
  "decodedMessageData": {
    "travelerInformation": {
      "msgCnt": 1,
      "timeStamp": 381239,
      "dataFrames": [
        {
          "sspTimRights": 0,
          "frameType": "advisory",
          "msgId": {
            "choiceID": 1,
            "roadSignID": {
              "position": {
                "lat": 474751745,
                "long_": 190578618
              },
              "viewAngle": {
                "bytes": "//8=",
                "unusedBits": "0",
                "from292_5to315_0degrees": true,
                "from315_0to337_5degrees": true,
                "from112_5to135_0degrees": true,
                "from135_0to157_5degrees": true,
                "from157_5to180_0degrees": true,
                "from202_5to225_0degrees": true,
                "from225_0to247_5degrees": true,
                "from022_5to045_0degrees": true,
                "from045_0to067_5degrees": true,
                "from090_0to112_5degrees": true,
                "from270_0to292_5degrees": true,
                "from247_5to270_0degrees": true,
                "from337_5to360_0degrees": true,
                "from067_5to090_0degrees": true,
                "from180_0to202_5degrees": true,
                "from000_0to022_5degrees": true,
                "bitSize": 16
              }
            }
          },
          "startTime": 73440,
          "duratonTime": 480,
          "priority": 3,
          "sspLocationRights": 0,
          "regions": [
            {
              "anchor": {
                "lat": 474753846,
                "long_": 190575238
              },
              "description": {
                "path": {
                  "offset": {
                    "xy": {
                      "nodes": [
                        {
                          "delta": {
                            "choiceID": 6,
                            "node_LatLon": {
                              "lat": 474753846,
                              "lon": 190575238
                            }
                          }
                        },
                        {
                          "delta": {
                            "choiceID": 6,
                            "node_LatLon": {
                              "lat": 474754975,
                              "lon": 190577181
                            }
                          }
                        },
                        {
                          "delta": {
                            "choiceID": 6,
                            "node_LatLon": {
                              "lat": 474751456,
                              "lon": 190582348
                            }
                          }
                        },
                        {
                          "delta": {
                            "choiceID": 6,
                            "node_LatLon": {
                              "lat": 474749460,
                              "lon": 190578308
                            }
                          }
                        },
                        {
                          "delta": {
                            "choiceID": 6,
                            "node_LatLon": {
                              "lat": 474753872,
                              "lon": 190575160
                            }
                          }
                        }
                      ]
                    }
                  }
                }
              }
            }
          ],
          "sspMsgRights1": 0,
          "sspMsgRights2": 0,
          "content": {
            "choiceID": 1,
            "workZone": [
              {
                "item": {
                  "choiceID": 0,
                  "itis": 6952
                }
              }
            ]
          }
        }
      ]
    }
  }
}

Let’s take a look at the details! Geographical coordinates are easily recognizable, they describe our engineering office in Budapest, Hungary. The start time is from the beginning of the year, from 0:00 a.m. on January 1, 2022, and is, at least officially, 8 hours a day. These values we have to input in minutes.

You can also see the “workZone” expression in the text. It usually describes an event on the road, but we are also proud to work on those roads: using our software to make them safer. Our free interpretation is not a problem at all. The ITIS code 6952 of the event only states: look-out-for-workers.

We could call ITIS codes the words and syllables of the V2X language. The codes are issued by an international body, the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE). SAE plays a key role in V2X standardization, without which communication between vehicles would hardly work.

Here at Commsignia we speak V2X on a native level and are happy to translate your everyday traffic problem into the language of mobility. Get in touch!

Mercedes takes a big step forward in self driving by being the first to receive a regulatory approval for Level 3 autonomous driving. Upcoming models with enhanced self-driving functions will rely on various sensors. LiDARs, radars and cameras will help cars navigate the streets autonomously with speeds up to 60 km/hour.

News articles focus on how drivers will benefit from autonomous systems, and that’s okay. The improvement truly changes the way we can work or have more fun in vehicles. But Commsignia is all about road safety, and we have found other interesting pieces in the details. 

It’s good to see how an OEM ensures failsafe operation. When self-driving conditions aren’t met, and the driver is not ready to take back control of the vehicle, the cars will safely stop, put on the hazard lights and activate an emergency call. That’s one of the moments in traffic when Vehicle-to-Everything or V2X communication solutions can come handy.

So where does V2X come into the picture?

With integrated V2X, cars can send a warning to other vehicles nearby: Hey, watch out, there’s a stopped vehicle on the road! Of course the message drivers see or hear won’t exactly sound like this, it’s up to the OEMs to find the best way to alert drivers.

How does the evolution of V2X compare to the evolution of self-driving? And where exactly is level 3 autonomous driving in relation to complete autonomy?

Take a look at this chart below to find out more:

As you can see, cooperation and automation evolve in parallel. We are at the point when deployed V2X systems can share sensor data with each other, allowing us to use improved safety services in vehicles. We’ve been working on the next level of cooperation for a while. Commsignia is actively participating in the standardization of Cooperative Perception, and not only for cars. 

Cooperative Perception is an integral part of how street sensors and cameras can share information with vehicles. This is essential to include the otherwise non-connected vulnerable road users, pedestrians and people riding bicycles or electric kickscooters in the V2X ecosystem.

Some say that a mobile phone provides a great opportunity to improve pedestrian safety. We can also argue the mobile phones cause dangerous situations on the streets, with drivers or pedestrians watching the display instead of the environment. It is certain that the development of digital communication between motorists and pedestrians requires great care so that it doesn’t become a distraction from a solution that seeks to increase safety.

This connection can be built up gradually, and smartphones that support Ultra-wideband (UWB) technology provide an excellent opportunity for this. Apple iPhones have UWB, and Commsignia has a neat solution built on that. 

UWB acts as a sensor

In road safety, the most important thing is to know where the traffic participants are and where they are going. UWB provides exactly what we need: the position of the user with an accuracy down to just a few centimeters. For reference, other technologies offer accuracy of few meters. UWB devices forward data to our Roadside Unit – or shortly RSU – which converts this information to standard V2X messages. These messages are understood by V2X on-board devices of vehicles, and appropriate actions can be taken before accidents occur.

This way we don’t have to deal with the user’s distraction, making pedestrian safety something more accessible to all. Smartphones can even stay in the pocket, and we only use UWB to determine the presence of the pedestrian. Our V2X roadside unit can also fuse data from multiple sources, so UWB can increase the reliability of pedestrian detection in various scenarios. This is especially helpful in avoiding false alarms.

Find out more about our VRU protection and pedestrian safety solutions by contacting us here.