 Autonomes Fahren 3
With this sketch, Professor Eckstein from RWTH Aachen outlined the key elements of the new project. Funding for this project was approved by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research in 2022.
It is the successor project to UNICAR.agil. That project focused on researching and developing the architecture for driverless vehicles. With autotech.agil, the number of project partners grew to 27. UNICAR.agil
provided the foundation for this, and now the groundwork has been laid for expanding it to encompass the entire transportation system.
The new requirement is already clear from the sketch. The central element is the digital city twin, located in the center of the sketch. This refers to a digital, highly detailed representation of a physical system,
product, or process.
You can see the division of tasks on the left for passenger transport and on the right for freight transport. The left part will then register not only self-driving shuttles (pictured above), but also pedestrians,
cyclists, self-driven cars, and systems that regulate traffic.
The cargo system is represented here by the cart in the image above, being loaded by a cargo shuttle. At the final demonstration, an automated system took over this process. The cart then autonomously
navigates its way to the delivery address.
Apparently, it's about a summary of all events and conditions relevant to road traffic, a computer-aided representation of the traffic. This then, so to speak, pre-plans the movements of every single road user.
Here is a temporary setup of a small section of the control center at the final event. At the very top of the list on the right side of the image is the 'Resilient Encrypted Communication'. It shows the listing in
modules how to protect against unauthorized interference in the entire procedure.
As a visitor, you get the impression that the second project paid much more attention to software. The term 'open source' is used very frequently. Once again, this also involves Linux, which seems to be
gaining increasing importance in the mobility sector.
Sustainability is also, of course, an important factor. Above you can see a vehicle that is so light and streamlined that it can be moved using muscle power. The technology used in electric bicycles could likely
also be applied here.
The image gives an impression of how deeply one intends to intervene in the physics of the vehicle, using the example of speed control. One can already get an idea of how strictly a poorly programmed
computer demands compliance.
The communication system with passengers also seems to need significant improvements. This is absolutely necessary, since authorization to open the doors cannot, of course, be granted everywhere.
There's still a lot to come, as we can see at the moment with the rescue of passengers from stranded ICE trains.
However, a regulation that was demonstrated in one of the experiments seems to make absolute sense. This system dealt with an accident scenario where an ambulance was en route to the scene. At the
same time, the software also took care of a shuttle that could have blocked the path of the ambulance.
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