Evaluation of Teleoperation Concepts to solve Automated Vehicle Disengagements

Teleoperation is a popular solution to remotely support highly automated vehicles through a human remote operator whenever a disengagement of the automated driving system is present. The remote operator wirelessly connects to the vehicle and solves the disengagement through support or substitution of automated driving functions and therefore enables the vehicle to resume automation. There are different approaches to support automated driving functions on various levels, commonly known as teleoperation concepts. A variety of teleoperation concepts is described in the literature, yet there has been no comprehensive and structured comparison of these concepts, and it is not clear what subset of teleoperation concepts is suitable to enable safe and efficient remote support of highly automated vehicles in a broad spectrum of disengagements. The following work establishes a basis for comparing teleoperation concepts through a literature overview on automated vehicle disengagements and on already conducted studies on the comparison of teleoperation concepts and metrics used to evaluate teleoperation performance. An evaluation of the teleoperation concepts is carried out in an expert workshop, comparing different teleoperation concepts using a selection of automated vehicle disengagement scenarios and metrics. Based on the workshop results, a set of teleoperation concepts is derived that can be used to address a wide variety of automated vehicle disengagements in a safe and efficient way.

CARLA-Autoware-Bridge: Facilitating Autonomous Driving Research with a Unified Framework for Simulation and Module Development

Extensive testing is necessary to ensure the safety of autonomous driving modules. In addition to component tests, the safety assessment of individual modules also requires a holistic view at system level, which can be carried out efficiently with the help of simulation. Achieving seamless compatibility between a modular software stack and simulation is complex and poses a significant challenge for many researchers. To ensure testing at the system level with state-of-the-art AV software and simulation software, we have developed and analyzed a bridge connecting the CARLA simulator with the AV software Autoware Core/Universe. This publicly available bridge enables researchers to easily test their modules within the overall software. Our investigations show that an efficient and reliable communication system has been established. We provide the simulation bridge as open-source software at https://github.com/TUMFTM/Carla-Autoware-Bridge

EDGAR: An Autonomous Driving Research Platform -- From Feature Development to Real-World Application

While current research and development of autonomous driving primarily focuses on developing new features and algorithms, the transfer from isolated software components into an entire software stack has been covered sparsely. Besides that, due to the complexity of autonomous software stacks and public road traffic, the optimal validation of entire stacks is an open research problem. Our paper targets these two aspects. We present our autonomous research vehicle EDGAR and its digital twin, a detailed virtual duplication of the vehicle. While the vehicle's setup is closely related to the state of the art, its virtual duplication is a valuable contribution as it is crucial for a consistent validation process from simulation to real-world tests. In addition, different development teams can work with the same model, making integration and testing of the software stacks much easier, significantly accelerating the development process. The real and virtual vehicles are embedded in a comprehensive development environment, which is also introduced. All parameters of the digital twin are provided open-source at https://github.com/TUMFTM/edgar_digital_twin.