Nowadays, active safety is an area of intense interest, performing advanced autonomous driving functions like collision avoidance or mitigation requires a local description of the environment. This local model may be usedto compute a risk function with other road users and eventually plan a manoeuvre to respond to the threat. Since a single sensor may not provide such model, data from several sensors are generally combined. Considering the specific case of Intelligent Transport Systems, sensors are located in the vehicles and on the roadside. Wireless communication allows performing vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-infrastructure data exchange. In addition to the sensors imprecision, acquisition systems and communication have latency times which induce spatial errors on the environmental model. A way topartially mitigate the effect of latencies is to timestamp the information in the same reference timescale. In this paper, authors present the SensorHub, a gateway with hardware time stamping capability that handles data acquisition from sensors or data buses and provides the data to a remote unit through an Ethernet link. The SensorHub has onboard time stamping capabilities based on a clock synchronized with the UTC (Universal Time Coordinated) provided by a GPS (Global Positioning System) receiver. Digital data acquisition and time stamping functionalities are implemented in a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array). Fiinally, two experimentations based on the high accuracy time stamping capability of the SensorHub are presented. For the covering abstract see ITRD E134653.
Abstract