Robin Brase

Autonomous driving 101: the full story

As a result of recent advances in many areas, such as large open source projects, technology has become far more accessible than ever before. Autonomous driving is no longer reserved only for the big players but can be applied by everyone to a certain extent. As a student team with years of experience in motorsports, the TUfast Eco team, therefore, decided to develop its very own autonomous vehicle. Based on the experiences with the new generation of this research vehicle, we will summarize important key points that are necessary for the realization of such a project. This includes an extensive overview of the hardware and software architecture required for a fully functional autonomous vehicle. The whole story of the development is being told, with all of the problems and their possible solutions. The aim of this talk is to give the audience an understanding of the big picture, from the processing of the sensor data to the control of the actuators. Thereby we look at the individual aspects and explain important concepts such as perception and path planning in an accessible manner. Furthermore, we demonstrate the necessity of simulation and the synthetic generation of training data.