Avatares

In the "AVATARES" project, a novel active test system for road vehicles was developed, which can be used to evaluate current and future driver assistance systems.

The challenges were on the one hand the design and implementation of a suitable test carrier and on the other hand the development of autonomous and reproducible driving maneuvers. For a maximum speed of 80 km/h, the test carrier was designed in such a way that it would not cause serious damage to the test vehicle in the event of a collision.

The developed driving guidance system consists of dedicated hardware modules for autonomous capabilities for localization, environment recognition as well as mission implementation. The corresponding modules are hierarchically interconnected, with the localization and environment detection modules evaluating the data provided by the sensors. This pre-processing and also the subsequent planning and control steps run on embedded computer units in real time at up to 100Hz. Direct remote control is also possible by means of a digital radio link. The spectrum of autonomous driving maneuvers covers the typical test situations for driving assistance systems.

Basic driving maneuvers of the test carrier include acceleration and braking processes, lane changes and entering the path of the vehicle under test. To realize these maneuvers, a highly accurate location determination, by means of RTK-GPS, has to be ensured.

In addition, the trajectory control for the guidance system was developed, whereby the target trajectory can be defined using the "AVATARES MissionPlanner" software.