Mobilità connessa, presentate a Torino le demo del progetto europeo ENVELOPE

The European Envelope project, dedicated to autonomous vehicle technologies, has been presented with its first road demonstration in Turin. The project, funded with 7 million euros from the Pnrr, has entered its operational phase after nearly three years of research and development. Prototypes will simulate dynamic accident reconstruction through autonomous vehicles, autonomous map updates, and vehicle-to-vehicle information exchange, as well as the autonomous reconfiguration of connected vehicles in circulation.

These are just some of the use cases tested. The experiment brings together research, industry, digital infrastructure, and real-world urban testing capabilities. In Italy, the market for connected vehicles and smart mobility is valued at 3.7 billion euros, with over 18.8 million connected cars (more than 40% of the national fleet) and 54% of Italians expressing willingness to use an autonomous vehicle.

Project ENVELOPE, which follows a phase of technological research and development, is entering a new operational phase and has brought its first road demos to Turin. There are 25 partners in the project, including the City of Turin, Teoresi Group, Fondazione LINKS, TIM Enterprise, HPE, and Nextworks. ENVELOPE also proposes solutions to remove obstacles to the development of autonomous and connected driving, from overcoming regulatory fragmentation between European countries to ensuring interoperability of road maps.

ENVELOPE is one of 27 research, innovation, and experimentation projects selected under the second call of the Smart Networks and Services Joint Undertaking (SNS JU) and fits into Turin's multi-year path of open innovation, such as Torino City Lab and the Living Lab ToMove. The goal of ENVELOPE is to support the development of experimental platforms and large-scale tests to promote the diffusion of 5G and test technologies that will lead to the definition of 6G, applied to autonomous and connected driving in an urban context.

Marco Bazzani, Innovation manager of Teoresi Group, emphasizes that the project's tests involve two scenarios, constructed to verify how advanced connectivity can impact the safety of autonomous and connected vehicles. In the first, the vehicle acts as a diffuse sensor, traveling through the constructed intersection to enter the observation zone and activate data recording at the predetermined height, where the presence of a crashed vehicle is simulated, with the collected information transmitted immediately to the infrastructure.

Applied on an urban scale, this functionality would enable real-time reconstruction of the dynamics of an accident and alert emergency services. The second scenario tests the autonomous reconfiguration of routes. The autonomous vehicle encounters a change in the road configuration, such as a construction site or a blocked road, and shares this information with subsequent autonomous vehicles, which download the updated maps and reconfigure the route based on the new information.

Turin thus becomes a real laboratory to verify not only the performance of the technologies but also the necessary infrastructural, organizational, and regulatory conditions for their future application at the urban scale. Chiara Foglietta, the City of Turin's Assessor for Mobility and Transport, states that the goal is not just to test individual technologies but to verify in real conditions the interaction between vehicles, communication networks, road infrastructure, data, and urban services, contributing to creating the conditions for the future development of autonomous and connected driving in Turin.

Fondazione LINKS has coordinated the development of the Italian ENVELOPE pilot. Claudio Pastrone, responsible for Connected System & Cybersecurity, highlights that it was a significant opportunity for the foundation to acquire new capabilities, knowledge, and competencies on a frontier technology like 5G Advanced, while also contributing to defining a research infrastructure that would allow businesses and other actors in the region to experiment with innovative applications based on this new technology.