Challenges of Automated Automobiles
Vehicle automation is among the most fascinating trends in automotive electronics and a huge challenge to Machine Vision. We investigate the information needed by automated vehicles and elaborate on the augmentation of sensor information by prior knowledge from digital maps. We show that cognitive and autonomous vehicles with a few close-to- market sensors are feasible when prior information is available from maps.
Vision plays the dominant role in our autonomous vehicle. Methods for automated mapping based on vision are discussed that build the basis for real-time automated decision-making and motion planning.
Extensive experiments are shown in real world scenarios from our AnnieWAY and BerthaOne experimental vehicles, the winner of the 2011 and second winner of the 2016 Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge, respectively. We also discuss lessons learned from the autonomous Bertha Benz memorial tour from Mannheim to Pforzheim through a highly populated area in Germany. Last not least the future evolution of automated driving and qualitative changes that vehicle automation induces to our traffic is discussed.
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Christoph Stiller
Christoph Stiller studied Electrical Engineering in Aachen, Germany and Trondheim, Norway, and received the Diploma degree and the Dr.-Ing. degree (Ph.D.) from Aachen University of Technology in 1988 and 1994, respectively. He worked with INRS- Telecommunications in Montreal, Canada for a post-doctoral year in 1994/1995. In 1995 he joined the Corporate Research and Advanced Development of Robert Bosch GmbH, Germany. In 2001 he became Chaired Professor and director of the Institute for Measurement and Control Systems at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany.
Dr. Stiller serves as Senior Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles (2015-ongoing) and as Associate Editor for the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Magazine (2012-ongoing). He served as Editor-in- Chief of the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Magazine (2009-2011). His automated driving team AnnieWAY has been finalist in the Darpa Urban Challenge 2007, first and second winner of the Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge in 2011 and 2016, respectively. He has served is several positions for the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society including being its President 2012-2013.