DGT Research Project to Increase Reliability in Environment Detection Sensors

The safety of advanced driver assistance systems depends heavily on their ability to perceive the environment and draw the right conclusions. Objects like streets, buildings, trees, vehicles, pedestrians or animals have to be detected quickly in order to properly assess their future behavior and respond accordingly, e.g. brake in time. In the context of the "Dynamic Ground Truth" (DGT) research project, under the consortium leadership of AVL, a high-resolution measuring system is used to capture reliable environment data, with the aim of developing a corresponding sensor system and a functional prototype.

The purpose of sensors in currently available vehicles, e.g. cameras, radar sensors or ultrasonic sensors, is to identify objects. The DGT system captures the objects with high accuracy and is able to compare them with the objects detected by the vehicle. For further processing at a later point in time, the anonymized information from all sensors is recorded. This enables the generation of scenarios for environment simulation tools, which, in turn, allows the reproduction of real scenarios in the simulation.

The results of this project are of utmost importance to all of the participating partners in order to develop advanced driver assistance systems and automated driving functions in a reliable and reproducible manner within an industrial market environment and perfectly fit into the ALP.Lab project, which is also funded by the FFG (the Austrian Research Promotion Agency). This project will help to maintain and consolidate the leading position of AVL and TTTech as suppliers of on-road measuring systems. The partners ViF, Joanneum Research and TU Graz bridge the fundamental gap to research and provide the necessary expertise in the areas of geolocation, vehicle electronics and image recognition. Recognized as a long-standing supplier of imaging sensors for survey applications, Vexcel Imaging GmbH will contribute its experience to the project.