FHG-CO-DRIVER - FROM MAP-GUIDED AUTOMATIC DRIVING BY MACHINE VISION TO A COOPERATIVE DRIVER SUPPORT

A digital road map provides partial knowledge about the operating environment for a road vehicle. If a road vehicle is equipped with a video camera, machine vision approaches can provide knowledge about the actual traffic environment around the vehicle. Experiences with a combination of two such approaches during the commissioning of a van for automatic driving on a private road network are reported, including experiences gathered during subsequent driving experiments on public roads and several improvement cycles for hardware and software. Based on these experiences, a second generation vehicle for automatic driving-a sedan-has been designed and commissioned. It is currently evaluated on public roads. This equipment provides an experimental platform for studying driver-vehicle interactions with the option to automatically evaluate actual traffic situations around the vehicle in real-time. Our equipment thus offers an approach to record and disentangle the multitude of factors which influence the-often subconscious-reactions of a driver. It is our working hypothesis that only an automatic, in-depth understanding of the actual traffic situation facilitates the design of a driver support system which is competent and flexible enough to win acceptance by a wide spectrum of users.