Autonomous Vehicle Guidance on Braunschweig's inner ring road within the Stadtpilot Project

With the “Stadtpilot”-Project the Technische Universit ät Braunschweig transfers the knowledge gained from its participation in the DARPA Urban Challenge Event to the real urban environment of Braunschweig's inner ring road. The goal is to drive fully autonomously in the traffic flow and to behave according to traffic rules. On October 8 th , 2010, the first “Stadtpilot”-vehicle called “Leonie” has shown its abilities to the public while driving fully autonomously on a selected part in the northeast of the ring road. This paper introduces the vehicle guidance system of “Leonie” that has proven its functionality on several hundred kilometers in real urban traffic by the end of 2010. The overall system functionality is shown as well as several driving situations that can be handled fully autonomously. In addition, the limitations of the current system are also discussed.