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Call key data
AI for advanced and collective perception and decision making for CCAM applications (CCAM Partnership)
Funding Program
Horizon Europe - Cluster 5 - Destination 6: Safe, Resilient Transport and Smart Mobility services for passengers and goods
Call number
HORIZON-CL5-2024-D6-01-04
deadlines
Opening
07.05.2024
Deadline
05.09.2024 17:00
Funding rate
100%
Call budget
€ 10,000,000.00
Estimated EU contribution per project
€ 5,000,000.00
Link to the call
Link to the submission
Call content
short description
Projects should develop methods to establish collective awareness of CCAM applications that are resilient to faulty sources, thereby ensuring safe operations and methods to embed an HI approach in the entire action chain towards collective awareness.
Call objectives
Today’s mobility landscape is rapidly changing, as is seen in the recent boom in the detection of advanced and/or complex urban scenarios that add new challenges to the development of CCAM technologies. These novel scenarios are especially emerging with the establishment of new urban traffic regimes and cultures, such as restricted zones, shared zones, and cycle-streets, which need to be taken into account when designing and developing CCAM solutions.
To integrate and tackle complex traffic scenarios, CCAM technologies will require highly advanced decision-making based on enhanced collective awareness – the stage beyond on-board perception, advancing on e.g. results from projects under CL5-2022-D6-01-05 – incorporating information from multiple sources and including interpretation for the aggregation of this information. Developing collective awareness should take into account the state of the vehicle, the driver and the road user environment. It can also involve the tracking of other road users' behaviour and generating predictions on a short horizon, which can be based on the input from advanced behavioural models, e.g. those developed within CL5-2022-D6-01-03 projects. The integration of these findings will lead to collective awareness for CCAM.
The use of multiple sources (sensors and sensor fused information, maps, infrastructure, other road users, and localisation systems) and the sharing of the overall situational information and related intentions of the vehicle and that of its direct environment will be an important building block towards collective awareness. Eventually, in future work this can be incorporated in complex, self-organised bottom-up models of collective behaviour based on the change/modelling of individual interactions. Collective awareness should create a larger time window in safety critical situations and generate benefits for the overarching mobility system, which include efficient traffic management and improved traffic flow as it incorporates situation prediction capabilities and environmental benefits (which can eventually include e.g. smart charging strategies).
AI is a key enabler to bring these increasing amounts of information together, with decision-making enabled both at vehicle level (including safety critical decisions) and at a mobility system level. In order to continue to define the role and limits of AI and of emerging new developments within AI, this topic recommends exploring Hybrid Intelligence (HI) as such a new subset of AI. Hybrid Intelligence is the process of developing and mobilising Artificial Intelligence (AI) to expand on human intelligence and expertise, thereby ensuring human-like control of CCAM operations. Applying an HI approach will allow CCAM technologies to integrate human expertise and intentionality into its decision-making in order to generate meaningful and appropriate actions that are aligned with ethical, legal and societal values. This will be essential to foster user acceptability, trust and adoption, especially when appropriate SSH expertise is included.
Proposed R&I actions are expected to address all of the following aspects:
- Methods to establish collective awareness of CCAM applications that are resilient to faulty sources, thereby ensuring safe operations. Guidance for failsafe designs should be developed.
- Methods to embed an HI approach in the entire action chain towards collective awareness (from basic perception to driving functions) to allow for seamless operation and real-time decision-making while enabling human-like control of CCAM applications by combining system and domain knowledge (of the vehicle and its technologies on one hand and of the transport environment including all the human interactions on the other, thereby understanding of potential risks and capabilities and needs of other road users). Tooling will be required to deliver situational awareness information in a structured way, based on multiple sources and in real-time. In addition, the development and integration of ethical goal functions to support collective awareness should be included. Work is expected to be based on:
- At least perception systems, sensor fusion, high-level world models/maps, vehicle positioning information. Guidance on common reference systems for positioning and time for synchronisation should be included in order to secure robustness and traceability.
- Relationships between the vehicle and forecasted intentions of other road users (e.g. a pedestrian crossing the street at a zebra crossing), as such including spatial temporal relation of elements in the driving-situation.
This topic requires the effective contribution of SSH disciplines including ethics and the involvement of SSH experts, institutions as well as the inclusion of relevant SSH expertise, in order to produce meaningful and significant effects enhancing the societal impact of the related research activities.
Proposals should monitor and align relevant developments under this topic with on-going discussions regarding EU type vehicle approval rules as well as in the framework of the UNECE.
In order to achieve the expected outcomes, international cooperation is encouraged in particular with Japan and the United States but also with other relevant strategic partners in third countries.
This topic implements the co-programmed European Partnership on ‘Connected, Cooperative and Automated Mobility’ (CCAM). As such, projects resulting from this topic will be expected to report on results to the European Partnership ‘Connected, Cooperative and Automated Mobility’ (CCAM) in support of the monitoring of its KPIs.
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Expected results
Project results are expected to contribute to all of the following expected outcomes:
- Approaches for resilient collective awareness, which can eventually be used in e.g. complex models of collective behaviour.
- Advanced collective awareness, decision making and triggering of actions for CCAM applications, enabled by new concepts and tools built on advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI), including Hybrid Intelligence (HI).
- CCAM solutions evolving from reactive into predictive system state awareness (including driver state and road user diversity), decision making and actuation, enhancing road safety.
- Understanding of AI-related ethical issues and user needs, together with capabilities, limitations and potential conflicts of AI based systems for CCAM, including a definition and a measure of human-like control.
- Increased user acceptability and societal benefit of CCAM solutions, based on explainable, trustworthy and human-centric AI. Interactions with AI-based vehicles are understandable, human-like and reflect human psychological capabilities.
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Eligibility Criteria
Regions / countries for funding
Moldova (Moldova), Albania (Shqipëria), Armenia (Հայաստան), Azerbaijan (Azərbaycan), Belarus (Беларусь), Bosnia and Herzegovina (Bosna i Hercegovina / Босна и Херцеговина), Faeroes (Føroyar / Færøerne), Georgia (საქართველო), Iceland (Ísland), Israel (ישראל / إِسْرَائِيل), Kosovo (Kosova/Kosovë / Косово), Montenegro (Црна Гора), Morocco (المغرب), New Zealand (Aotearoa), North Macedonia (Северна Македонија), Norway (Norge), Serbia (Srbija/Сpбија), Tunisia (تونس /Tūnis), Türkiye, Ukraine (Україна), United Kingdom
eligible entities
Education and training institution, International organization, Non-Profit Organisation (NPO) / Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO), Other, Private institution, incl. private company (private for profit), Public Body (national, regional and local; incl. EGTCs), Research Institution incl. University, Small and medium-sized enterprise (SME)
Mandatory partnership
Yes
Project Partnership
To be eligible for funding, applicants must be established in one of the following countries:
- the Member States of the European Union, including their outermost regions
- the Overseas Countries and Territories (OCTs) linked to the Member States
- third countries associated to Horizon Europe - see list of particpating countries
Only legal entities forming a consortium are eligible to participate in actions provided that the consortium includes, as beneficiaries, three legal entities independent from each other and each established in a different country as follows:
- at least one independent legal entity established in a Member State; and
- at least two other independent legal entities, each established in different Member States or Associated Countries.
Any legal entity, regardless of its place of establishment, including legal entities from non-associated third countries or international organisations (including international European research organisations) is eligible to participate (whether it is eligible for funding or not), provided that the conditions laid down in the Horizon Europe Regulation have been met, along with any other conditions laid down in the specific call topic.
A ‘legal entity’ means any natural or legal person created and recognised as such under national law, EU law or international law, which has legal personality and which may, acting in its own name, exercise rights and be subject to obligations, or an entity without legal personality.
Specific cases:
- Affiliated entities — Affiliated entities (i.e. entities with a legal or capital link to a beneficiary which participate in the action with similar rights and obligations to the beneficiaries, but which do not sign the grant agreement and therefore do not become beneficiaries themselves) are allowed, if they are eligible for participation and funding.
- Associated partners — Associated partners (i.e. entities which participate in the action without signing the grant agreement, and without the right to charge costs or claim contributions) are allowed, subject to any conditions regarding associated partners set out in the specific call conditions.
- Entities without legal personality — Entities which do not have legal personality under their national law may exceptionally participate, provided that their representatives have the capacity to undertake legal obligations on their behalf, and offer guarantees to protect the EU’s financial interests equivalent to those offered by legal persons.
- EU bodies — Legal entities created under EU law including decentralised agencies may be part of the consortium, unless provided for otherwise in their basic act.
- Joint Research Centre (‘JRC’)— Where provided for in the specific call conditions, applicants may include in their proposals the possible contribution of the JRC but the JRC will not participate in the preparation and submission of the proposal. Applicants will indicate the contribution that the JRC could bring to the project based on the scope of the topic text. After the evaluation process, the JRC and the consortium selected for funding may come to an agreement on the specific terms of the participation of the JRC. If an agreement is found, the JRC may accede to the grant agreement as beneficiary requesting zero funding or participate as an associated partner, and would accede to the consortium as a member.
- Associations and interest groupings — Entities composed of members (e.g. European research infrastructure consortia (ERICs)) may participate as ‘sole beneficiaries’ or ‘beneficiaries without legal personality’. However, if the action is in practice implemented by the individual members, those members should also participate (either as beneficiaries or as affiliated entities, otherwise their costs will NOT be eligible.
other eligibility criteria
Activities are expected to achieve TRL 5 by the end of the project.
If projects use satellite-based earth observation, positioning, navigation and/or related timing data and services, beneficiaries must make use of Copernicus and/or Galileo/EGNOS (other data and services may additionally be used).
Additional information
Topics
Relevance for EU Macro-Region
EUSAIR - EU Strategy for the Adriatic and Ionian Region, EUSALP - EU Strategy for the Alpine Space, EUSBSR - EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region, EUSDR - EU Strategy for the Danube Region
UN Sustainable Development Goals (UN-SDGs)
Additional Information
All proposals must be submitted electronically via the Funders & Tenders Portal electronic submission system (accessible via the topic page in the Search Funding & Tenders section). Paper submissions are NOT possible.
Proposals must be complete and contain all parts and mandatory annexes and supporting documents, e.g. plan for the exploitation and dissemination of the results including communication activities, etc.
The application form will have two parts:
- Part A (to be filled in directly online) contains administrative information about the applicant organisations (future coordinator and beneficiaries and affiliated entities), the summarised budget for the proposal and call-specific questions;
- Part B (to be downloaded from the Portal submission system, completed and then assembled and re-uploaded as a PDF in the system) contains the technical description of the project.
Annexes and supporting documents will be directly available in the submission system and must be uploaded as PDF files (or other formats allowed by the system).
The limit for a full application (Part B) is 45 pages.
Call documents
HE-Work Programme 2023-2024, Cluster 5, Destination 6HE-Work Programme 2023-2024, Cluster 5, Destination 6(747kB)
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