Open Access

Axel Sikora

• Increasing efforts are spent for safe traffic. A multitude of projects is ongoing in Germany, in Europe and worldwide. They cover the different aspects of traffic safety, including car to car and car to infrastructure communication. However, safety aspects for vulnerable road users (VRUs) are not in the main scope of the developments, although they are significantly involved to the road accidentsIncreasing efforts are spent for safe traffic. A multitude of projects is ongoing in Germany, in Europe and worldwide. They cover the different aspects of traffic safety, including car to car and car to infrastructure communication. However, safety aspects for vulnerable road users (VRUs) are not in the main scope of the developments, although they are significantly involved to the road accidents and fatalities. Therefore, the WATCH-OVER project, supported by the European Commission, plays a special role. Within this project, the localization of VRUs in relation to vehicles is of key importance. This paper describes possible solutions to support this task. Special aspects, such as absence of pre-installed infrastructure, low-cost and low energy consumption are taken into account. It can be shown, that short range wireless networks (SRWN) with added ranging capabilities provide a suitable approach to combine self-localization with relative localization. Measurement results of raw and of postprocessed data show the promising accuracy in real-world scenarios.…