| Project Title: | VICEROY - Vehicular Integrated Sensing and Communications for Enhanced Road Safety |
| Funding Agency: | National Science Foundation |
| Award Number: | 2554628 |
Road safety is a signature issue of modern times. Accidents involving motor vehicles, both in collisions with other motorists, and with other road users such as pedestrians, cause more than 40,000 deaths and $400 billion economic damage in the US, with increasing tendency. Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) play a key role in improving road safety, as well as reducing stress for drivers and thus improving quality of life. Current systems predominantly utilize a vehicle-hosted sensing approach, and work mainly in the presence of a line-of-sight between the car and the objects it wants to detect. To remedy this situation, our proposal aims to develop a Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) system based on NextG cellular technology, with coordinated use of both User Equipment (UE) and Base Station (BS). To avoid the prohibitive costs of building up sensor infrastructure across the country, Integrated Communication and Sensing (ICAS) offers the possibility of using the existing cellular infrastructure for this task, while 5G receivers integrated into cars receive those signals and determine the location and speed of objects that would be occluded to traditional sensors. Our goal is to provide a suite of vehicular safety applications that surpass the capabilities of current state-of-the-art (SOTA) of ADAS, and that will significantly influence the future of NextG cellular standards. The fundamental concept relies on bistatic radar with a moving receiver, implemented in the downlink of a 5G/6G cellular system in the <6 GHz frequency range. The project is a collaboration between USC, University of California at San Diego (UCSD), General Motors (GM), and Ericsson.