Interview Giulio Vivo - SAFESPOT

Relevant data travels on the wheel!

If you ask Giulio Vivo, Deputy Coordinator of the SAFESPOT Integrated Project, the future will see enormous progress regarding the safety of vulnerable road users. The breakthrough result that SAFESPOT will present at the Cooperative Mobility Showcase is the concept of direct connectivity between vehicles, in combination with connectivity between vehicles and road-side equipment. "This showcase is at least four times bigger than what was presented in Stockholm at the ITS World Congress. Amsterdam features the most complex and large-scale cooperative set-up ever, with the newest findings", says Vivo.

SAFESPOT is an integrated research project co-funded by the European Commission under the 6th Framework Programme for Research. For the past four years, SAFESPOT's consortium of companies have designed cooperative systems for road safety based on vehicle to vehicle (V2V) and vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) communication.
Changed perspective of safety
In doing so, SAFESPOT is changing the concept of safety on the road. It’s extending and enlarging the normal possibilities available to date. By realizing in-car-intelligence and in-car-information exchange, the driver is given unprecedented support. As Vivo points out: “In urban areas, 70 percent of accidents happen at intersections. We are convinced we can bring this number down significantly. Part of the necessary infrastructure is already in place at intersections. Add to that our technological inventions and we can prevent for example collisions, back-end mishaps and accidents in the blind spot of cars and trucks.”
Unprecedented scale of demonstrations
Like both the other integrated projects, COOPERS and CVIS, SAFESPOT presents its final achievements of research at the Cooperative Mobility Showcase 2010. As Vivo points out, the co-operation between the Integrated Projects and their consortium members is unique. The joint effort results in a truly unified presentation at the Showcase, with the results being presented and discussed at the conference and demonstrated at the Demo Sites, while a select number of consortium partners present themselves at the i&CDrive exhibition. “As Deputy Coordinator, I’m very pleased with the Showcase. Everyone involved in traffic technology and especially policy makers of the different European governments and Transport Departments should attend the event. They must experience the final achievements of integrated research projects for themselves. It’s a unique chance to ride the demo route and see and feel for yourself what the future of road safety will bring.”
Real breakthrough
The key aspect, the real breakthrough, as Vivo calls it, is the concept of cooperative mobility. There is no single ‘killer application’, but the real step forward is the increased road safety resulting from smart cars communicating with each other and with road-side units. Much in the same way as radar map systems work for flight control leaders, these cooperative mobility systems can pro-actively respond to calculated risks related with, for example, overtaking manoeuvres, intersection situations, road obstacles and road conditions due to atmospheric events. “Personal and economic damage can be minimized much further, by implementing cooperative mobility. We’re all road users, we all stand to benefit from this!”
SAFESPOT aims to prevent these road accidents with a "Safety Margin Assistant", which detects in advance potentially dangerous situations and extends, in space and time, drivers’ awareness of the surrounding environment, thus going from autonomous intelligent vehicles to cooperative systems.
SAFESPOT applications
  • Safety distance and speed advice
  • Hazard warning: ghost driver detection
  • Hazard warning: obstacle detection and frontal collision prevention
  • Rear end collision prevention
  • Safe overtaking assistance
  • Lane change manoeuvre assistance
  • Road depature prevention
  • Dangerous curve warning
  • Vulnerable road user detection
  • Incident detection and warning
  • Warning of sudden reduced visibility
  • Safety margin for assistance and emergency vehicle
  • Intersection collision prevention
  • Road condition status
  • Signalling of deviation for road works
  • Vehicle counting & direction detection
For more information, download the SAFESPOT leaflet.