At a special event organized by SAE International in Brussels late last year, representatives of the European space sector and automotive industry discussed trends and issues in urban mobility, including automated driving and robust positioning, navigation and timing (PNT).
“We have far too many fatalities and injuries in traffic, and that’s something we cannot tolerate,” Robert Bosch Director of Autonomous Driving Christian Scharnhorst said during his keynote address. Scharnhorst cited global figures of 1.35 million fatalities per year, which is 3,700 per day, and 50 million injuries. “I’m totally convinced that automated mobility can provide a safer traffic environment.”
That said, the European Union (EU) automotive industry has not been as successful as hoped in its transition toward the mobility of the future. “It’s not a secret,” Scharnhorst said, “at Robert Bosch, as with our competitors and other automotive players, we are laying people off. On a daily basis, we are losing talent and important capabilities needed to materialize automated mobility.”
If the trend continues, doors will be open for competitors in other regions. In Asia, for example, competitors are eager and able to take the lead in automated driving (AD), but also in electric vehicles (EVs), artificial intelligence (AI) and the software defined vehicle (SDV).
“We are in a fierce competition, “Scharnhorst said. “Many EU startups have disappeared and many others are struggling to survive. The EU-based AD-ecosystem is under the highest ever financial pressure, and here, in Brussels, some have been hesitant to acknowledge that.”
After an especially difficult period, Scharnhorst said, signs out of the European capital are slowly turning more positive: “For years it has been a kind of game for certain politicians to cultivate mistrust against the automotive industry, and there may have been reasons for not trusting some automotive managers, a few of whom actually infringed law.”
In the latter half of the 2010s, executives at a large European auto maker were found to have committed fraud as they tried to deceive emissions regulators in the United States. The case made headlines across the globe and was a major embarrassment for the EU.
“That cannot be an argument to ban automotive in general,” Scharnhorst said, “to cultivate a mistrust of everybody in the sector. I believe there are some elements of hope that the key message is finally getting through, that without automotive in Europe we have a real problem. We can and we should sharpen the narrative for automated mobility, and we have the Draghi and Heitor reports that give us valuable arguments to set a new course.”
On Paper
Published in September 2024, the so-called Draghi Report (‘The Future of European Competitiveness—A Competitiveness Strategy for Europe”), penned by Mario Draghi, former president of the European Central Bank and Prime Minister of Italy, lays out a comprehensive strategy to address Europe’s competitiveness challenges. At issue is Europe’s economic viability in the face of global competition, specifically with respect to the U.S. and China.
The Heitor report, led by Manuel Heitor, former Portuguese science minister, also appeared in the fall of 2024. It recommends changes in the European Union’s current Framework Program for Research and Innovation (FP10, 2028-2035). The report criticizes the EU’s approach to research funding, arguing most of its support goes toward incremental advances rather than paradigm-shifting initiatives.
“We need to invest in R&D that leads to applications, getting to scaling,” Scharnhorst said, “preserving existing startups and getting big enterprises back into the investment arena. We live in a world that’s changing. We went from a nice globalization, with a task sharing approach, to a more fragmented, geopolitically tense situation, where we once more need to stand our ground. There are critical control points where we have to be independent and rely on ourselves, not on foreign technology.”
Money and Market Matters
The automotive industry is a big deal for Europe, and it is working hard to maintain its position. Meanwhile, the Union has ambitious plans for future mobility, in particular in urban environments. Underlying the success of all foreseeable solutions, present and future, including every manner of unmanned vehicle, are key technologies, especially PNT. Here, it seems, Europe is also lagging. And then, one has to ask, why?
Shedding light was Gonzalo Martin de Mercado, PNT Competitiveness Manager for the European Space Agency (ESA) Navigation Innovation and Support Program (NAVISP). “NAVISP focuses on supporting European industrial R&D,” Martin de Mercado said, “and particularly in PNT. Now, you might wonder why a space agency is doing this. Aren’t we supposed to develop space systems? It’s because we see Europe falling behind the rest of the world in everything that is PNT.
“We have this amazing system, Galileo, that is paid for with European taxpayers’ money. It’s a technical marvel, but the problem comes on the business side. How do you sell something that’s free? Everyone has it in their smartphones, they use it, they don’t pay anything, so how can you sell that?”
The open signal delivered by Galileo is indeed free, but the equipment needed to receive it is not. Martin de Mercado said, “If we think about GNSS chips, the chips you need to use Galileo services, we can say, ‘OK, let’s make some chips and sell them. That’s a way to make this huge investment pay.’”
It’s not a new idea. EUSPA, the European Agency for the Space Program, formerly the GSA, has long provided support for European R&D aimed at capitalizing on Galileo services, including the development of new applications and chipsets.
“Looking into that,” Martin de Mercado said, “we see that the first producer of chips for Galileo in the world is an American company.” The second producer is an American company. The third producer is a Japanese company. The first European producer of chips for PNT is somewhere around number 10, a Swiss company called u-blox. “And this brings us to our point,” Martin de Mercado said. “We all agree that PNT is foundational for our digital technologies and society, but our dependence on non-European PNT chipsets is astonishing.
“And this is why we’re supporting your R&D,” he said, “because we want you to develop new products, to catch the competitiveness in PNT, and we’re also supporting the development of complementary and alternative PNT technologies.”
To be fair, Martin de Mercado said, European players do undertake some very big and important GNSS-related research activities, often successfully, but just as often aimed at developing highest-level solutions for the most demanding applications, which are not easy to carry around in your pocket.
“There is a difference in approach between Europe, the U.S. and Asia,” he said. “They tend to focus on business-to-consumer, while in Europe we tend to focus on business-to-business. Americans will tell you you have to listen to the consumer, because this will allow you to scale.” Martin de Mercado challenged anyone in the audience to call out a Fortune 500 company that does not address the consumer market or work with someone who addresses the consumer market. Everyone looked around but no one said anything.
“In Europe,” he said, “because we don’t have the ability to scale, because we lack the consumer orientation, we tend to address the professional market. We develop super-good and very expensive technologies, and we don’t sell much.”
A secondary issue, he said, remains the fragmentation of the European market. In the U.S., any company can potentially access 350 to 400 million customers immediately. If you start a company in France, you have a potential market of 60 to 65 million people. “We are the European Union,” Martin de Mercado said, “with a single market, yes, but I’m a French company and I want to do business in Germany, I still have to establish a company in Germany, I have to pay taxes in Germany, and there’s more, which you know about. All this costs time and money, putting European companies that want to scale at a disadvantage.”
More Success, More Hurdles
The picture was plain, not for the faint of heart. The Europeans (i.e. all the participants) at the meeting were riveted. Aside from defense and the consumer markets, including things like smartphones, Martin de Mercado said, “the automotive sector is the largest user of PNT technologies, and Europe produces, as of today, more than half the worldwide PNT solutions for automotive. That’s a fantastic achievement, but in 2022, 26 million cars were produced in China, 12 million cars were produced in the U.S. and 7 million cars were produced in Japan, while Germany, the largest European manufacturer, made only 3.5 million, and Spain 3.3 million.
“So we have an ecosystem that produces half the PNT technology for automotive in the world, but the vast majority of cars in the world are produced in China. It’s not hard to imagine those supply chains sooner or later leaving Europe to join that other ecosystem. That’s why we’re here today. We want to hear what you’re going to do about this.”
The call was registered, deep breaths were taken. Well considered responses, we believe, will be forthcoming. Meanwhile, attention turned to the skies, where that key enabling technology continues its triumphant rise.
No Mobility Without PNT
Cécile Deprez, researcher next generation GNSS at the German Aerospace Center (DLR), briefed attendees on plans for future Galileo satellites. “Today, our satellites communicate with a network of ground stations, but they don’t communicate with each other. It is very expensive to run and maintain those ground facilities, so our solution is to introduce satellite-to-satellite communications.”
On that subject, Rafael Lucas Rodriguez, head of NAVISP Program Office at ESA, said “Satellite-to-satellite communication is something we need to add to the next generation. These links could be radio frequency [RF]-based, like other systems are doing, or they could be optical, which is more advanced. A constellation is like a mesh, and with inter-satellite links you can really keep control of that mesh. The measurement of distances, for example, from satellite to satellite, can be more precise, because you don’t have to go through the atmosphere, which can always introduce errors.”
“In the immediate future we are likely to use RF links,” Deprez said, “but certainly in the third generation of Galileo, a bit farther on, we will introduce optical technologies, where we get high data rates, 50 to 100Mb per second of data communication, and we can also get very precise ranging between the satellites, at the millimeter or sub-millimeter level, plus the possibility of transferring time information at the picosecond level.”
One of the biggest challenges for satellite positioning is clock synchronization. The ability to synchronize satellite clocks directly, in space, will represent a huge advance. “We can greatly improve orbit estimation and reduce dependence on the ground segment,” Deprez said, “so we won’t need as many expensive-to-maintain ground stations. Ultimately, the robustness of the system will increase, with improved precision, PPP convergence time and other benefits.”
DLR is leading a number of Galileo projects, including the upcoming OpSTAR, working in close cooperation with ESA and partners to test Galileo satellite ranging, data dissemination and time synchronization, via satellite-to-satellite optical link.
Driving Toward Automation
Back on Earth, Aria Etemad of Volkswagen Group Research and Innovation talked about an important ongoing project led by his company. The Hi-Drive project, co-funded by the European Union, is the largest European effort in automatic driving, where the objective is robust and reliable AD. “Today’s automated driving is interrupted when you go from A to B,” Etemad said, “by fog, by accidents, by road works, you name it. There are GNSS occlusions, complex traffic situations, merging and exiting.”
Hi-Drive wants to defragment and extend AD operations, while advancing interoperability across countries and brands. The project introduces the concept of “enablers” aimed at closing gaps where AD is typically interrupted. “These enablers could be things like vehicle communication with cybersecurity,” Etemad said,” or high-precision positioning and localization, vehicle AI and machine learning.”
Other enablers include a geo-referenced cloud-based positioning service, forecasting GNSS signal quality in challenging environments such as urban canyons, tunnels and parking garages. The project is leveraging sensor fusion for localization, including simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) geometry identification, seamless positioning for low-speed maneuvers in close quarters, and object detection in urban environments.
“We’ve put a big team together, working in four thematic areas, to come up with 12 technical solutions and 63 implementations and tests,” Etemad said. In a recent demonstration, one Hi-Drive-equipped vehicle navigated the eight-kilometer-long Rennsteig Tunnel, the longest tunnel in Germany, operating in AD mode at about 80km per hour and without, of course, a GNSS signal.
“At automation level three, L3, the driver is still in charge and is responsible for everything that is happening,” Etemad said. “We are just now introducing levels 3 and 4. Daimler has introduced L3 for traffic jams and VW has announced we will pick up the robotaxi in Hamburg, a full-automation L4 service.”
Robotaxi services, initially without passengers, have been testing in Hamburg since 2021. Volkswagen Group is planning to operate the service through its mobility subsidiary MOIA, using fully electric ID.Buzz vans.
“For L4, we are using tons of sensors in our vehicles, to understand the environment, and this is expensive, so it’s not something you can produce for mass market. We need to reduce the complexity, and we think one solution would be to get information from outside the vehicle, and this is what we’re moving toward.”
Worth It
We return to where we started, the cost in lives of traditional driving. “Over 90% of traffic accidents are caused by human errors or behavior,” Etemad said. “But we also know that humans drive safely for millions of kilometers for every accident that occurs. That’s the level of reliability we’ll need to achieve with our automated systems.”
ESA’s Lucas Rodriguez believes it can happen, and he will have the last word here: “Yes, we need automated driving, because the future of urban mobility is mixed modality, with vulnerable users like pedestrians, bicycles and so on, all sharing the infrastructure with cars and larger vehicles. I know all about that because I live in Holland. Automated mobility will certainly improve safety there.”
