Challenges for Highly Automated Driving – Powertrain Requirements

Authors

Univ.-Doz. Dipl.-Ing. Dr. techn. S. Poledna, Privatdoz. Dipl.-Ing. Dr. techn. W. Steiner,
TTTech Auto AG, Vienna

Year

2019

Print Info

Fortschritt-Berichte VDI, Reihe 12, Nr. 811

Summary

With automated driving, the control of more and more driving scenarios shifts from the human driver to the autonomous driving system. Therefore, the driver is relieved from the obligation to interact with the vehicle at any time. Automated driving requires the vehicle to solve highly complex tasks:
(a) the vehicle must analyze the environment and understand the current driving situation (by the use of an appropriate sensor set and fusion of the sensor readings)
(b) the vehicle must autonomously plan a driving maneuver, based on its understanding of the current driving situation, and
(c) the vehicle must execute the planned maneuver.
Furthermore, all these functionalities must be executed reliably and typically in a fault-tolerant manner.
The most demanding challenges of automated driving are currently the first two areas described above: to reliably understand the driving situation and to plan an appropriate maneuver. Although the execution of a maneuver is a complex task as well, the dedicated solutions for this problem are well-known. Automated driving also requires an intelligent power train that is able to accept the planned maneuvers as inputs and to
control the vehicle in tight coordination with the other automotive systems. The type of power train is not a key concern – it may be electric, hybrid, or combustion-only. In this presentation we discuss said functionalities for fully automated driving and discuss the challenges in detail.