Autonomous systems are a key issue in the future of global mobility. With the latest assistance systems, innovations in sensor technology and environment recognition as well as the ongoing digital networking in everyday life, the vision of autonomously acting systems appears to be feasible.
Global Navigation Satellite Systems
A large part of these developments leads back to an increasing use of global navigation satellite systems, abbreviated GNSS, which is accompanied by a rapid diffusion of assistance systems and active safety systems into everyday processes. On the way towards fully autonomously acting systems, different levels of automation are recognised: assisted, partially automated, highly automated, fully automated and driverless.
These levels differ in the amount of human control interventions and control functions as well as in the amount of the systems’ automated interventions and security functions. With an increasing level of automation, human interactions decrease while system interventions increase. All levels share a common requirement of highly accurate positioning data. The more safety functions the system performs, the higher the importance of availability and integrity information of the processed data becomes.
The group Navigation Solutions is developing the basis for autonomously driving systems using satellite navigation. Apart from GPS, the European navigation system Galileo is explicitly used as well. The overall focus lays on an improvement of position, velocity and orientation calculation accuracy by sensor fusion and the integration of external data, which requires reliable and highly available data sources. Another aspect on the way to autonomous driving is the networking of vehicles among one another and their mutual exchange of information. Only by a network of all road users, an autonomous and safe traffic can be realized. Furthermore, the evaluation and integrity of data plays a key role for these applications in safety-critical fields, e.g. in open environments with mixed traffic. So, disturbing sources and system errors can be detected reliably and control systems can react appropriately.
Methodological approaches of the group Navigation Solutions :
- GNSS-aided localization and navigation
- Networked control systems
- Sensor fusion