The Stadtpilot project aims at autonomous driving on Braunschweig's inner city ring road. For this purpose, an autonomous vehicle called "Leonie" has been developed. In October 2010, after two years of research, "Leonie's" abilities were presented in a public demonstration. This vehicle is one of the first worldwide to show the ability of driving autonomously in real urban traffic scenarios. This paper describes the legal issues and the homologation process for driving autonomously in public traffic in Braunschweig, Germany. It also dwells on the Safety Concept, the system architecture and current research activities.
The development of the autonomous vehicle named "Caroline" for the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge was a great opportunity to demonstrate the abilities of the Technische Universität Braunschweig in the research field of autonomous driving. Among 11 teams out of the initially 89, the CarOLO team mastered the challenges to qualify for the final DARPA Urban Challenge event. Based on this experience, the Technische Universität Braunschweig is currently working on the follow-up project "Stadtpilot" with the objective to drive fully autonomously on Braunschweig's entire ring road, which is known as the arterial road of its inner city traffic. This paper introduces the "Stadtpilot"-Project in the context of the Urban Challenge experience and identifies the differences to previous activities in this research context. The scientific claim will be shown in contrast to the Urban Challenge scenario. Completely new concepts are required to master the challenges of realizing autonomous driving in the domain of Braunschweig's inner ring road. An approach for the comprehensive treatment of path-planned sections is shown that realizes complex and precise autonomous driving maneuvers in a real urban environment and is observed as the first major success of the "Stadtpilot"-Project. Curvature optimized trajectories are generated over the whole roadway that are independent from the way driving decisions are found.
With the "Stadtpilot"-Project the Technische Universität Braunschweig transfers the knowledge gained from its participation in the DARPA Urban Challenge Event to the real urban environment of Braunschweig's inner ring road. The goal is to drive fully autonomously in the traffic flow and to behave according to traffic rules. On October 8 th , 2010, the first "Stadtpilot"-vehicle called "Leonie" has shown its abilities to the public while driving fully autonomously on a selected part in the northeast of the ring road.This paper introduces the vehicle guidance system of "Leonie" that has proven its functionality on several hundred kilometers in real urban traffic by the end of 2010. The overall system functionality is shown as well as several driving situations that can be handled fully autonomously. In addition, the limitations of the current system are also discussed.
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