In a campaign to minimize fuel consumption and journey times, EU-financed research project will soon introduce road trains on European roads. The road trains, Sartre (Safe Road Trains for the Environment, will link up eight separate vehicles - cars, buses and trucks all included in a platoon, so that the prescribed objective can be fulfilled. The vehicles in the road train will be led by a vehicle driven by a professional driver, while all the other cars will be monitored by a software monitoring system, which’ll allow all the other drivers in the platoon to relax as their cars will be autonomously controlled by the lead vehicle.
Mr Robinson, a project co-ordinator at engineering firm Ricardo was quoted saying:
We’re looking at what it would take to get platooning on public highways without making big changes to the public highways themselves. Each of the vehicles will have their own control and software monitoring system, there may well be a platoon sensor envelope that collates information and presents it to the lead vehicle so it can understand what is happening around all the vehicles.
Trials of the road train project are scheduled to be held on test tracks in the UK, Spain and Sweden.
Via: BBC
