Barriers connected through V2I, moving towards smart mobility together with Road Steel (Gonvarri)

In recent years, substantial efforts have been undertaken to achieve maximum vehicle autonomy. A crucial aspect of this is vehicles’ immediate awareness of its surroundings, which is heavily reliant on receiving information from other vehicles (via V2V communications) and intelligent road infrastructures (via V2I communications).
It is now common to hear about communication between vehicles and road infrastructures such as traffic signals or traffic lights. Going a step further, communication is also being established with road containment systems (metal barriers, impact attenuators, etc.) and removable barriers present in the infrastructure.

To that end, Road Steel (Gonvarri Industries) is developing a new generation of barriers that includes a control unit with various sensors to monitor the barriers. This control unit will be connected to RSUs (Road Side Units), and through the use case developed by GMV on both the RSU and OBU sides, utilizing the management and configuration tool for these devices (the C-ITS Hub), these barriers will be able to send information to vehicles traveling on the road. In this use case, GMV has integrated available information for the service using IEEE 802.11p and 3GPP (C-V2X)/PC5 technology, as well as applicable standards for the operational demonstration of the system.

The implementation and rollout of these communications aim to expand the information available to vehicles, thereby increasing their level of caution or anticipation of certain risk situations. On one hand, road users can receive alerts from barriers that have detected potential accidents that may be obstructing the road. On the other hand, concerning opening barriers, users can be notified if the existing barriers on the road are open, as well as changes to the road (e.g., new lanes being opened or closed or new lanes being opened for driving).

This represents another step toward the concept of connected roads, leveraging V2X connectivity wherein GMV is collaborating with Gonvarri, by contributing its technology to make progress towards safer mobility.