Stadtpilot: Driving autonomously on Braunschweig's inner ring road

The development of the autonomous vehicle named “Caroline” for the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge was a great opportunity to demonstrate the abilities of the Technische Universität Braunschweig in the research field of autonomous driving. Among 11 teams out of the initially 89, the CarOLO team mastered the challenges to qualify for the final DARPA Urban Challenge event. Based on this experience, the Technische Universität Braunschweig is currently working on the follow-up project “Stadtpilot” with the objective to drive fully autonomously on Braunschweig's entire ring road, which is known as the arterial road of its inner city traffic. This paper introduces the “Stadtpilot”-Project in the context of the Urban Challenge experience and identifies the differences to previous activities in this research context. The scientific claim will be shown in contrast to the Urban Challenge scenario. Completely new concepts are required to master the challenges of realizing autonomous driving in the domain of Braunschweig's inner ring road. An approach for the comprehensive treatment of path-planned sections is shown that realizes complex and precise autonomous driving maneuvers in a real urban environment and is observed as the first major success of the “Stadtpilot”-Project. Curvature optimized trajectories are generated over the whole roadway that are independent from the way driving decisions are found.