KARIYA, Japan ― DENSO Corp., in collaboration with Tongji University in Shanghai, is testing vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) technology on public roads in Taicang, Jiangsu Province, China this week from March 23 to March 27.
"As vehicles rapidly increase on China’s road and the introduction of public buses increase, communications between vehicles and roadside infrastructure are expected to help make bus transportation smoother and improve fuel efficiency," said Yasushi Yamanaka, DENSO’s executive director in charge of the Engineering Research & Development Center.
Through communications between public buses and roadside infrastructure, buses will be able to pass through traffic sections without stopping at a traffic light by noting the optimal driving speed for a vehicle or an appropriate time to leave a bus stop, or by changing the traffic light when the public bus is approaching. The experiments are intended to help improve the traffic flow of public buses and also improve fuel efficiency and help reduce CO2 emissions.
This will be DENSO’s second field test in China with Tongji University regarding vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2X) technology, following a test conducted in March 2012. In the previous field test, emergency vehicles wirelessly communicated with surrounding vehicles and roadside infrastructure to give the right of way to authority vehicles in case of emergency and to help prevent vehicle collisions.
DENSO has been globally researching and developing V2X technology since 2003. At its test track in Japan, DENSO has simulated an urban road environment to check the communication performance and to develop and evaluate applications with actual vehicles. The results have been used to develop in-vehicle devices, which have been provided to various demonstration experiments involving collaboration among automakers and government agencies in Japan, the U.S. and Europe.