USDOT has issued a new acquisition to advance Cooperative Driving Automation (CDA), technology that allows vehicles, roadside infrastructure, and other road users to share data and address gaps that standalone vehicle automation cannot resolve on its own, such as occlusions, complex merges, and pedestrians hidden from view at intersections.
Background: Previous USDOT-supported research has demonstrated CDA feasibility at technology readiness levels (TRL) 3–5 in laboratory and closed-course settings. Broader adoption has been limited, however, as most new vehicles lack CDA capabilities and OEMs have been reluctant to integrate the technology into production lines, citing low consumer awareness and unclear regulatory, policy, and institutional frameworks.
Purpose: This acquisition seeks industry-led teams to advance CDA prototypes from research concepts to pre-production systems at TRL 6–7. The goal is to validate that data exchanged between vehicles and roadside infrastructure is accurate, secure, and reliable enough to support functional safety, and to generate data to inform a national CDA deployment strategy across rural, suburban, and urban roadways.
Priority use cases:
| 1. Work Zone Management | 3. Traffic Incident Management |
| 2. Cooperative Perception | 4. Emergency/Transit Vehicle Awareness |
Process: Contractors will complete two phases:
| 1. Controlled testbed testing to validate interoperability, functional safety, and cybersecurity. |
| 2. A small-scale, real-world demonstration on public roads with mixed traffic to assess operational readiness. |
Full solicitation details are available on SAM.gov.
