Advanced Driver Assistance Systems and Autonomous Driving

The research group Advanced Driver Assistance Systems and Autonomous Driving exists since 20 years now and is the largest group at the institute with more than 10 academic staff members. The research is aimed at making individual traffic safer. Driver assistance systems support driver for example while monitoring the blind spot in the rear of the vehicle during lane changes or warning them when they are approaching a traffic jam. The transition to full automation and autonomous driving is fluently. While driver assistance systems are already standard in passenger cars and trucks today, there are only a few automated sub-functions in production vehicles available today, such as for automatic parking or automatic driving in traffic jams on highways. Autonomous driving in any environment and at any weather condition is still a long way off.

Research is therefore being conducted within the our working group on many aspects and technical components of autonomous vehicles. In order to be able to drive automatically, a vehicle has to be able to precisely detect its surroundings and, based on this, assess the behavior of other road users. In addition, an automated vehicle must know the traffic rules and has to follow them. On the basis of this knowledge, it then has to make decisions for its own behavior, whereby the safety of the occupants, but also of other road users, is of course paramount. For these tasks, new methods and algorithms are being developed that can be executed in real time on computers in the vehicle and in intelligent infrastructure. In particular, this includes mathematical methods for the accurate and reliable detection of other road users with camera, lidar and radar sensors, the prediction of their probable behavior and, based on this, the planning and automated execution of the driving task using highly accurate digital maps of the road network.

For testing the methods in real traffic, several automated test vehicles have been successfully set up at the institute in cooperation with industrial partners. The Institute for Measurement, Control and Microtechnology at the University of Ulm is thus one of the few research institutes in Germany and worldwide that is technically capable of operating automated test vehicles in public road traffic. Like the major vehicle manufacturers and suppliers working on these topics, it has the necessary official exemptions.

If you are interested in a bachelor's or master's thesis or a HiWi job in one of the research groups, please contact the respective group members or see our list on currently available theses (access only from the university's intranet/VPN, German only).

The scientific publications  of all reaserach groups can be found in the institute's publication database.