A system for powering components in a vehicle seat enables electronic components within the vehicle seat to receive power without wires connecting the seat to a vehicle body. The system includes a power transmitter that generates an electromagnetic field, and a power receiver located within the vehicle seat and the electromagnetic field. The power receiver is configured to generate electrical power from the electromagnetic field and deliver the power to at least one component in the vehicle seat.

Contactless Power Transfer System

Many companies aim for delivering systems for autonomous driving reaching out for SAE Level 5. As these systems run much more complex software than typical premium cars of today, a thorough testing strategy is needed. Early prototyping of such systems can be supported using recorded data from on-board and surrounding sensors as long as open-loop testing is applicable; later, though, closed-loop testing is necessary—either by testing on the real vehicle or by using a virtual testing environment. This paper is a substantial extension of our work presented at the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC) that was surveying the area of publicly available driving datasets. Our previous results are extended by additional datasets and complemented with a summary of publicly available virtual testing environments to support closed-loop testing. As such, a steadily growing number of 37 datasets for open-loop testing and 22 virtual testing environments for closed-loop testing have been surveyed in detailed. Thus, conducting research toward autonomous driving is significantly supported from complementary community efforts: A growing number of publicly accessible datasets allow for experiments with perception approaches or training and testing machine-learning-based algorithms, while virtual testing environments enable end-to-end simulations.

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Test Your Self-Driving Algorithm: An Overview of Publicly Available Driving Datasets and Virtual Testing Environments

In this work, we propose a novel taxonomy to partition the problem of testing advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) into three basic dimensions. These dimensions are detailed and confirmed with recent research. Our framework permits the consideration of open research questions which have to be answered to pave the way for future highly automated driving. Despite the importance of this problem, a similarly comprehensive and structured survey has to the best of the authors' knowledge not been developed before.

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Testing of Advanced Driver Assistance Towards Automated Driving: A Survey and Taxonomy on Existing Approaches and Open Questions

Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V)-communication-based collision avoidance systems detect if two vehicles are on a collision course (e.g., in crossroads, intersections, and highway merging), and they are particularly useful in the absence of line of sight (LOS) owing to buildings, roadside infrastructures, and road bending. Relying on radio measurements using a 4 $\times$ 30 multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) system at 5.3 GHz, this paper presents the results of an empirical study of V2V propagation channels in two suburban crossroad scenarios, where vehicles are either moving in the same direction and separate from each other along different roads or pass each other in opposite directions at the crossing. The quasi-stationarity interval is first characterized using correlation matrix distance (CMD). Small-scale fading follows a Nakagami distribution based on the Akaike information criteria (AIC). Delay and angular dispersions are found to be significantly affected by the type of crossroad and the presence of an LOS. Cross-correlation coefficients between delay dispersion, angular dispersion, and small-scale fading behavior are also evaluated. By comparing the results of the different crossroads, it is found that the delay and angular dispersions are large in the first type of crossroad. By contrast, in the second type of crossroad, small delay and angular dispersions are observed due to road bending and obstruction by roadside trees.

Vehicle-to-Vehicle Radio Channel Characterization in Crossroad Scenarios

Electronic toll collection transponders, e.g., E-ZPass, are a widely-used wireless technology. About 70% to 89% of the cars in US have these devices, and some states plan to make them mandatory. As wireless devices however, they lack a basic function: a MAC protocol that prevents collisions. Hence, today, they can be queried only with directional antennas in isolated spots. However, if one could interact with e-toll transponders anywhere in the city despite collisions, it would enable many smart applications. For example, the city can query the transponders to estimate the vehicle flow at every intersection. It can also localize the cars using their wireless signals, and detect those that run a red-light. The same infrastructure can also deliver smart street-parking, where a user parks anywhere on the street, the city localizes his car, and automatically charges his account. This paper presents Caraoke, a networked system for delivering smart services using e-toll transponders. Our design operates with existing unmodified transponders, allowing for applications that communicate with, localize, and count transponders, despite wireless collisions. To do so, Caraoke exploits the structure of the transponders' signal and its properties in the frequency domain. We built Caraoke reader into a small PCB that harvests solar energy and can be easily deployed on street lamps. We also evaluated Caraoke on four streets on our campus and demonstrated its capabilities.

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Caraoke: An E-Toll Transponder Network for Smart Cities

During the last few years, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) wireless communication has become a key objective for enabling future cooperative safety applications, such as intersection collision warning. In this paper, we present the results of a 5.9 GHz V2V performance measurement campaign at four different urban intersections under NLOS conditions using commercial off-the-shelf wireless interface cards which meet the 802.11p and ITS-G5 specifications. Particularly, we quantify the packet delivery ratio (PDR) and received signal strength indication (RSSI) levels associated with different scenario conditions with respect to vehicle positioning, intersection geometry and traffic density. We determine reliable communication ranges which constitute an important metric for V2V collision avoidance applications.

Vehicle-to-Vehicle IEEE 802.11p performance measurements at urban intersections

Context: Consumer tests which assess safety features of modern vehicles have a tradition in Europe. Recently, such test protocols have been substantially extended to also cover active safety systems like Volkswagen's Front Assist.

Simulations on Consumer Tests: A Systematic Evaluation Approach in an Industrial Case Study

Safety applications are envisioned to be the first Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) applications delivered to the mass market in the near future. In this paper, we address the question of achievable application-level reliability while operating over the Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) channel. We advocate, that this reliability is a cumulative metric, which combines the main application operational requirements bounded with network performance metrics. In this context, we focus on (i) required information freshness and communication range, as main communication performance requirements and (ii) path prediction error, as application operational requirement. We present a novel simulation approach towards quantifying these metrics based on MATLAB vehicle dynamics models coupled with a driver reaction model. The input data for the simulation study is obtained empirically through real world experiments. This allows us to achieve numerical results with high accuracy. Further, based on data gathered in extensive real world measurement campaigns, we assess application-level reliability under different realistic conditions and perform a feasibility analysis of various NLOS scenarios while showing their potential for future V2V applications on the example of the Intersection Collision Warning (ICW). Finally, we investigate whether the packet delivery ratio (PDR) is capable to capture application-level reliability adequately and compare it with the metrics proposed in this work.

Reliability analysis of vehicle-to-vehicle applications based on real world measurements

A belt buckle for a motor vehicle is provided wherein, through the use of the belt buckle, a tongue of a seat belt is mechanically receivable and, through the use of a switch, an insertion status of the tongue is detectable. A device is assigned to the switch through the use of which the switch position of the switch is wirelessly communicable to a receiver circuit.

Belt buckle for a motor vehicle

Context: Consumer tests for vehicles have long a tradition of almost two decades in Europe to assess vehicular safety abilities. For active safety systems like an emergency braking guard, different consumer-test-organizations (CTOs) around the world intensify now the challenges for automotive Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) in terms of specific test protocols.

André Leschke

Papers

Vehicle-to-Vehicle IEEE 802.11p performance measurements at urban intersections

Simulations on Consumer Tests: A Systematic Evaluation Approach in an Industrial Case Study

Reliability analysis of vehicle-to-vehicle applications based on real world measurements

Belt buckle for a motor vehicle

Simulations on consumer tests: A systematic evaluation approach in an industrial case study