U.S. DOT : Request for Quotation - Development and Production of Dedicated Short Range Communications at 5.9 GHz: "Here I Am" Devices

16th July, 2010, a solicitation from Department of Transportation ot the U.S. (solicitatoin details on FedBizOpps website) reveals the activities of the IntelliDrive program on Safety Pilot.

From the technical Appendix, one can see the intended device is exclusively elabrated for transmitting "Here I am" message (the SAE 2735 Basic Safety Message). From the standardization point of view, the device has to comply with IEEE 802.11, IEEE 802.11p, IEEE P1609.2, IEEE 1609.3, IEEE 1609.4, SAE J551, SAE J1211, SAE J2945-1 and SAE J2735-200911. To be noticed, the current technical requirements do not include any sentence regarding the positioning precision. However, there are quite stringent requirments on the PER and transmission range: "The overall device shall support vehicle-to-vehicle communication throughout a range of 1m to
500m with a maximum Packet Error Rate of 0.1%, in an open field."

Through this solicitation, the DOT would like to build up a Qualified Product List, which will be the exclusive vendor list that can participate in the procurement of the Safety Pilot.

The price of the initial devices response to the solicitation was limited to $50,000 each.

So far, there are three vendors listed on the FedBizOpps website as interested vendors. They are:
- Denso Internaltion America, INC.
- Bluemont Technilogy & Research, INC.
- Kapsch TrafficCom INC.

For the detailed information regarding the solicitation, please refer to the following links:
The official information page on the U.S. FedBizOpps website;