SARTRE Platooning Project Declares Success

Researchers led by Ricardo plc and Volvo Car Corp. say their three-year demonstration of vehicle platooning in Europe shows the technology is feasible on ordinary public roadways.

The group, dubbed SARTRE (for Safe Road Trains for the Environment), held its final demonstration of platooning technology earlier this month. The $8 million project received about 60% of its funding from the European Commission's Framework 7 program.

SARTRE aimed to show that platooning could improve safety, reduce traffic congestion and improve fuel efficiency.

This month's final demonstration on a Volvo test track in Sweden involved four autonomously driven vehicles that were able to follow each other as closely as 13 feet while traveling at speeds as high as 56 mph. The technology permits properly equipped vehicles to enter or leave the platoon, which follows a lead truck piloted manually by a professional driver. Vehicles within the train instantly respond to each other to brake as needed but otherwise steer themselves.

The final system includes a prototype touchscreen that participating vehicles can use to join or leave a road train or communicate with other vehicles in the platoon.

Ricardo says SARTRE is the only such project to showcase technology that could be implemented on conventional highways and in the presence of nonparticipating traffic. The developers concede that allowing platooning on public roads would require changes in current laws that require vehicles to be under constant manual control by a human driver. They envision the first platoons running in dedicated highway lanes.

SARTRE's partners in addition to Riccardo and Volvo were Spain's Applus+ Idiada Technical Center and Robotiker-Tecnalia Technology Center, Germany's Institut fur Kraftfahrwesen Aachen (IKA) and Sweden's SP Technical Research Institute and Volvo Technology Corp.