2.2 The Basics on Automation
2.2.5 Research Programmes on Automated Vehicles
There is a number of notable research projects targeting fully automated driving. An overview of worldwide activities until 2005 is presented by Bishop [12].
– The projectPROMETHEUS(PROgraMme for a European Traffic of Highest Efficiency and Unprecedented Safety) running from 1987 to 1995 within the frame of the research initiative EUREKA was the pioneer project on driverless cars [16]. They demonstrated autonomous driving on regular roads solely based on computer vision. As a remarkable milestone, in 1994 they drove more than 1,000 km at a maximum speed of 130 km/h on a three-lane highway near Paris including lane changes and passing of other cars. In 1995 Ernst Dickmanns and his team at the Bundeswehr University of Munich had their autonomous vehicle drive the 1,000 km from Munich to Copenhagen, Denmark, and back in regular traffic and at a maximum speed of 180 km/h [42]. For safety reasons, a driver was in the car to intervene if necessary, which was the case in construction sites or other unclear traffic situations.
– PATH8 (Partners for Advanced Transit and Highways), founded in 1986, has been estab- lished by the Institute of Transportation Studies of the University of California, Berkeley, in order to tackle California road traffic problems. They make use of the Automated Highway System (AHS) with magnetised steel spikes integrated with the road surface as positioning
7http://live.unece.org/fileadmin/DAM/trans/conventn/Conv_road_traffic_EN.pdf 8http://www.path.berkeley.edu/
aid for automated vehicles. They realised a number of advanced functions most notably car, bus and truck platooning. A number of automatically controlled vehicles drove be- hind each other with few meters distance, in order to maximise road capacity and minimise congestion (cf. 2.2.3, [59]). Moreover, they demonstrated collision warning, automated bus lane change and docking, lane merge, smart parking, crosswalk and intersection as- sistance, etc. Truck platooning activities have also been addressed in the German project
KONVOI[94].
Figure 2.8: Car platooning using the Automated Highway System (from [93]).
– In 2002 the DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), a technology agency of the US Department of Defense, originated a competition calledDARPA Grand Chal-
lenge9. Driverless vehicles had to autonomously navigate and reach a destination 150 miles
away in the Mojave desert, USA. The first Grand Challenge took place in 2004, where none of the started vehicles reached the destination. 2005 five of 23 participating teams could finish the challenge, the fastest vehicle in a time of less than seven hours. The last com- petition so far was theUrban Challenge in 2007. The setting had been changed from a desert to an urban area, an abandoned Air Force base. The autonomous cars had to navigate through a given 60-mile course following traffic regulations and without hitting obstacles or other (also manned) vehicles. Six teams were able to accomplish this task within the time limit of six hours [29].
– A different application field of automated driving is taken by theTrackTrainer, developed by BMW in 2006 [169]. The TrackTrainer is a system designed to support drivers in finding the ideal line on a race track and is used in BMW’s driver training programme. The system works in three phases: first, the car drives the previously recorded ideal line on the track
autonomously. The driver behind the steering wheel memorises the driven path and tries to follow it as closely as possible in the next round when driving manually. This is supported using a feedback mechanism that indicates the deviation from the ideal line. After the drive, the driver can analyse the recorded data offline, compare the manual driven path to the ideal line and discover potential improvements.
– The European HAVEit10 (Highly Automated Vehicles for Intelligent Transport) project was launched in 2008. A consortium of automobile manufacturers, first tier suppliers and universities develop a virtual co-system supporting the driver in order to drive safe, energy- efficient and comfortable. The relevant use cases are automated merging into traffic flow, automated queue assistance, temporary auto-pilot, and active green (energy-efficient) driv- ing.
– In 2010, Alberto Broggi and his group from the Vislab, University of Parma, Italy, origi- nated theVislab Intercontinental Autonomous Challenge11, the longest distance driven autonomously by then. Their automated vehicle followed a leading car along 13,000 km from Parma in Italy to Shanghai in China from July to October. The vehicle was elec- trically powered and equipped with an array of cameras, laser scanners and solar panels. Broggi is also known for his activities in the earlierARGO12 project (1996-2001), where the ARGO autonomous car drove 2,000 km automatically within one week, only equipped with two black/white cameras [10, 19, 20].
– In the project Stadtpilot of the Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany, an in- telligent vehicle called ’Leonie’ has been shown to drive autonomously in an urban en- vironment in dense traffic [177]. Based on experience gained in the mentioned DARPA challenge, Leonie was enabled to drive on Braunschweig’s Inner Ring Road by itself.
Also the US internet company Google engages in developing autonomously driving cars, supposedly out of interest in challenges in artificial intelligence13. General Motors presented the
EN_V14 in 2010, an electricity-powered drive-by-wire concept vehicle for two passengers, able to operate autonomously.
The named projects mainly deal with the technical realisation of automated driving, the interaction with the driver in case of automation errors has not yet been addressed sufficiently. Despite all those and many more activities in the area of automated driving research, there is still a long way to go, until safe autonomous door-to-door transportation in an arbitrary environment can be reached. 10http://www.haveit-eu.org/ 11http://viac.vislab.it/ 12http://www.argo.ce.unipr.it/ARGO/english/ 13http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/science/10google.html 14http://media.gm.com/content/media/us/en/news/news_detail.html/content/Pages/news/us/ en/2010/Mar/0324_env