Autonomous vehicles (AVs) offer a promising solution to mitigate human errors and, consequently, reduce the number of road traffic fatalities. While AVs may significantly reduce the number of collisions in the future, they will not be able to completely eliminate it, as certain accidents cannot be avoided due to the physical limitations of the vehicle, and the boundary conditions imposed by the environment. This paper presents an initial investigation into a novel methodology that aims to mitigate the consequences of unavoidable accidents by determining the vehicle trajectory that minimizes injuries to the occupants of the AV in real-time. This result is achieved using a multibody (MBD) crash simulation software to simulate all the possible impacts and determine the one with the lower severity. The approach used is hybrid: the AV can run simulations in real-time as well as access a database where pre-simulated crash results are stored. The maximum computational time required by the software to perform an impact simulation was 80 milliseconds, comfortably within the total time allowable for the AV to detect the unavoidable accident and implement corrective actions, determined to be 0.3 seconds for the scenarios considered. The results of the multibody code were compared with a finite element code, and among the severity indices considered, the Theoretical Head Impact Velocity index has the highest correlation coefficient between the two software. Overall, the proposed methodology demonstrated potentiality both in terms of results and feasibility and could have significant implications for the development of safer self-driving cars.

This paper presents an overview of the coding aspects of a GNSS receiver. Coding allows detection and correction of channel-induced errors at the receiver, here the focus is on the mitigation of threats from malicious interferences. Although the effects of interference at different stages of GNSS baseband processing has been deeply analyzed in the literature, little attention was devoted to its impact on the navigation message decoding stage. Theis paper provides an introduction to the various coding schemes employed by current GNSS signals, discussing their performance in the presence of noise in terms of block-error rate. Additionally, the benefits of soft-decoding schemes for navigation message decoding are highlighted when jamming interferences are present. The proposed scheme requires estimating the noise plus interference power, yielding to enhanced decoding performances under severe jamming conditions. Finally, cryptographic schemes as a means of providing anti-spoofing for geosecurity location-based services, and their potential vulnerability are discussed, with particular emphasis on the dependence on the dependence of the scheme on successful navigation message decoding.