A hardware and software framework for cognitive automobiles

Abstract

Abstract-This paper describes the hardware and software framework of AnnieWAY, an autonomous vehicle successfully competing at all qualification stages up to the finals of the DARPA Urban Challenge 2007 competition. Besides the hardware premises for by-wire steering, braking, throttle control and sensors, two frameworks for high-level decision making and low-level control are described in detail. Furthermore, this contribution points out AnnieWAY's safety features for both unmanned competition runs and manned testing. The system proves to be flexible, expandable, and robust at the same time.

A hardware and software framework for automotive intelligent lighting

“…Hardware components 1) Vehicle platform: As a testing platform at our department an AUDI Q7 3.0 TDI vehicle is available and ready to use. Since the technical framework developed at our as well as at our partners' department described in [10] has shown great performance and reliability, a similar basic setup has been integrated in the AUDI.…”

“…All opteron processors are interconnected by HyperTransport (HT) at a speed of 3, 2 GByte/s each. For logging purposes a very fast raptor hard disk is used, providing 44 − 91 M B/s and sustaining accelerations up to 3 g [10].…”

“…Concerning the acquisition of thermal images the FLIR 10 "PathFindIR" unit have been integrated into the framework. With a particularly designed housing for automotive application, a resolution of 320 x 240 uncooled microbolometer and a frame rate of approximately 25 Hz is the unit linked via ethernet to the computing system.…”

“…It incorporates an L1/L2 RTK GPS receiver for position and a second GPS reveiver for accurate heading measurement [10].…”

3D perception and planning for self-driving and cooperative automobiles

“…Embodiment is widely considered a crucial element in cognitive systems research. To assess and validate theoretical findings we have adopted the unified hardware and software framework of the Karlsruhe-Munich collaborate research center 'cognitive automobiles' [8], [9]. Based on the architecture depicted in Figure 2, meanwhile some ten experimental cognitive automobiles were set up [10], [6], [11].…”