Teleoperated road vehicles - The "Free Corridor" as a safety strategy approach

Research in the field of unmanned road vehicles, especially autonomous vehicles, has been increasing over the last decades. However, fully autonomous road vehicles are still far from being a reality, particularly in urban areas due to the fact that the machine is still not fully capable of correctly interpreting its environment. Therefore, teleoperated road vehicles present a transitional solution, where a human driver is brought back into the control loop, but without having to be physically present in the vehicle. The information between the vehicle and operator is transmitted through mobile networks. The connection cannot be guaranteed at all times and it cannot be predicted when a connection loss is going to happen. Therefore, an appropriate safety concept for a connection loss is required. This paper presents the safety concept named "Free Corridor"' as a solution to the problem. Here, the human decides which path the vehicle would follow in the case of a connection loss, thus avoiding the decision-making problem of autonomous vehicles. This paper shows the implementation of the concept "Free Corridor" and shows that it is a suitable concept for teleoperated road vehicles.