Mario Hirz
Graz University of Technology, Austria
Title: The potential of autonomous driving technologies for low-cost city cars
Biography
Biography: Mario Hirz
Abstract
Automated driving functions are able to increase vehicle safety and customer comfort. They also have potential to improve road traffic management and to reduce negative impacts of traffic on environment. In this way, car manufacturers, supplier and reserach institutes increasingly perform R&D activities in the area of automated driving on the way to the self-driving car. The submitted work treats an evaluation of automated driving functions for the application in electrically driven low-cost city cars. The intended evaluation is focused on SAE level 5, which means fully automated cars that do not require a driver, and even no passengers. This type of vehicles might be used for logistics, delivery service and similar applications, but also as self-driving people mover. Autonomous navigation of such vehicles is similar of those of robots, which includes tasks of localization, path planning, and path execution. These tasks require appropriate sensor systems and computation strategies to recognize and cluster continuously changing environmental conditions in daily traffic scenarios. An important role plays the applied sensor and object recognition technology, representing cost-intensive modules. In this context, different sensor technologies are evaluated in terms of their capability of road and surounding area observation, driveway and obstacle recognition, the robust provision of data for vehicle control and path planning as well as economic parameters. Sensor fusion comes to use to combine advantages of different technologies and to provide reliable object detection to under different environmental conditions. The paper closes with exemplary applications of autonomous driving technologies in small city vehicles and a prospect of development trends.