125 years after Bertha Benz completed the first overland journey in automotive history, the Mercedes Benz S-Class S 500 INTELLIGENT DRIVE followed the same route from Mannheim to Pforzheim, Germany, in fully autonomous manner. The autonomous vehicle was equipped with close-toproduction sensor hardware and relied solely on vision and radar sensors in combination with accurate digital maps to obtain a comprehensive understanding of complex traffic situations. The historic Bertha Benz Memorial Route is particularly challenging for autonomous driving. The course taken by the autonomous vehicle had a length of 103 km and covered rural roads, 23 small villages and major cities (e.g. downtown Mannheim and Heidelberg). The route posed a large variety of difficult traffic scenarios including intersections with and without traffic lights, roundabouts, and narrow passages with oncoming traffic. This paper gives an overview of the autonomous vehicle and presents details on vision and radar-based perception, digital road maps and video-based self-localization, as well as motion planning in complex urban scenarios.

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Magnetoplasmonsin a strongly modulated two-dimensional electron gas are studied within the random-phase approximation, including for the first time local fields as well as screening effects in the ground state. With increasing modulation a transition from "bulk" to "edge" magnetoplasmons accompanied by a frequency lowering is observed. Our results open a new interpretation of recent far-infrared experiments and correct predictions of classical model calculations that become unphysical for submicrometer systems.With modern microstructuring techniques the quasitwo-dimensional electron gas (2D EG) in, e.g. , aGaAs/(Al, Ga)As heterostructure can be laterally confined on a submicrometer scale to quasi-onedimensional (1D) structures (quantum wires) or quasizero-dimensional dots. ' Size quantization of electronic energy levels due to the lateral confinement has clearly been demonstrated by magnetotransport measurements on quantum wires with a width less than 500 nm. ' In view of the great importance of optical methods such as far-infrared (FIR) spectroscopy, the interesting question arises how the size quantization affects the spectra. Although some recent FIR data have been interpreted in terms of transitions between single-particle levels, ' it has been emphasized that in general the FIR radiation excites collective oscillations in many-electron systems. 'In order to interpret FIR experiments correctly, it is, therefore, important to understand the nature of plasrnons and magnetoplasmons in these geometrically confined, submicrometer electron systems.So far, the FIR experiments have usually been evaluated on the basis of the well-known dispersion relation for magnetoplasmons in an unmodulated 2D EG, co =co +2ne n q/mv, where co and q are the frequency and (in-plane) wave number of the plasmon, co, is the cyclotron frequency, m and~are the effective mass and dielectric constant, and n, is the areal density of the 2D EG. For example, Hansen et al. , who have studied the transition from a weakly modulated 2D EG to a quantum-wire superlattice by applying a depletion voltage V between the 2D EG and a microstructured grating gate, observed (for small modulation) a linear decrease of the squared resonance frequency with Vs and used Eq. (1) to calculate an average density n, of the modulated 2D EG, assuming q =2m/a, with a the period of the grating gate. Demel et al. determined a width 8' of their quantum wires from Eq. (1). For a plasma wave having nodes on opposite edges of the wires, q =n./8' ("plasmon in a box"), they obtained much larger 8' values than from their transport measurements. They argued that modified boundary conditions might resolve this discrepancy.W'e demonstrate in this Brief Report that the interpretation of FIR experiments on such submicrometer systems on the basis of Eq. (1) in general is not justified and ignores important physics. We present magnetoplasmon results obtained from a fully quantum-mechanical calculation within the random-phase approximation (RPA), based on a model of a 2D EG in a sinu...

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