Michael Helmle

Architecture and System Safety Requirements for Automated Driving

Driver assistance systems have been successfully deployed to the market in the last fifteen years resulting in an increase of driving comfort and driving safety. In the future, these systems will be able to analyze ever more complex traffic situations and to support the driver or even act independently. Upcoming functionality will lead to partially automated driving, highly automated functions will follow soon after. With the increase of automation the role of the driver is going to change gradually from an active driver to a passenger at least for some duration of the drive. We discuss the implications of this evolution on the requirements for future vehicle architectures. In particular, we discuss the electric on-board power supply of critical driving components for longitudinal and lateral vehicle guidance and derive system safety and architectural requirements.

Wide Base Stereo with Fisheye Optics: A Robust Approach for 3D Reconstruction in Driving Assistance

We propose a new approach to achieve 3D environment reconstruction based on automotive surround view systems with fisheye cameras. In particular, we demonstrate that stereo vision techniques can be applied in overlapping areas of adjacent cameras, which are up to 90 degrees per camera pair in the current setup. Lateral limitations are mainly due to the present system configuration and can be extended. No time accumulation is required, therefore the update rate of the range information is given by the frame rate of the imager. We show by means of experimental results that our approach is capable of delivering 3D information from a pair of images under the described configuration.

System Architecture and Safety Requirements for Automated Driving

Driver assistance systems have been successfully deployed to the market in the last 15 years, resulting in an increase of driving comfort and driving safety. In the future, these systems will be able to analyze ever more complex traffic situations and to support the driver or even act independently. Upcoming functionality will combine longitudinal and lateral control to partially automated driving functions; highly automated functions will soon follow. With the increase of automation, the role of the driver is going to gradually change from an active driver to a passenger, at least for some duration of the drive. In this chapter, we discuss the implications of this evolution on the requirements for future vehicle architectures.

Towards Surround Stereo Vision: Analysis of a New Surround View Camera Configuration for Driving Assistance Applications

We propose a new camera configuration for automotive surround view systems where the criteria for which the camera mountings are optimized is derived not from visualization, but optimal depth measurements. We show that based on special algorithmic processing [1] it is feasible to achieve 3D reconstruction in almost the complete surrounding of the car. In order to accomplish this, more than 4 cameras are required and the positions have to be carefully selected. An analysis of the proposed configuration is performed with regard to the field of view overlaps and we show that the estimated depth is good compared to reference measurements conducted with a lidar sensor.