Autonomous Maschine for Applications as Emergency Response/ Fire Fighting, Forestry, and Viticulture

The project aims to deploy autonomous systems, particularly a Unimog, in highly complex environments, such as forestry, landfills, viticulture, disaster environments, and fire services. The application areas demand high precision, are risky, or are monotonous, tedious, and repetitive. In particular, autonomous driving and working in highly complex scenarios is a core innovation that must be mastered.

The project builds upon the results of the AutoCV project. In total, the project addresses four innovation areas. First, it addresses the creation of a realistic simulation of real application scenarios. For this purpose, the existing Unreal-engine-based simulation is expanded to include additional sensors, plus specific scenes. Therefore, the simulation environment creation and testing will be automated. In this context, new tools for code generation and analysis are also to be developed.

The second goal is to create safety concepts for autonomous driving in impassable terrain. For this purpose, the robustness increases through applying bio-inspired and behavior-based methods. Further, special-purpose sensors are integrated into the system. Research efforts also address the comprehensibility of autonomous driving decisions for human operators.

The third innovation area comprises the improvement of the vehicle's environment recognition and interpretation. For this purpose, the semantic interpretation is to be improved in particular. Finally, specialized control approaches are to be developed for the various application scenarios.