When it comes to autonomous driving, cities are often cited as the perfect place for the technology: traffic is complex, but also more regular, with much lower speeds than on motorways, and many infrastructures can be used as “communications environments”. for information transmitted from one vehicle to another.

The city itself is the focus of the STADT:up project (stadt is German for city), which is funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Affairs. The project aims to make autonomous driving in the city will become a reality by 2025 and many companies participate, including Opel.

AI in focus

Autonomous driving has many fundamental aspects, and Opel’s work is to develop recognition of the environment around the car using artificial intelligence, giving it the ability to broadcast data from the external environment to then “command” the car.

In a sense, it is a kind of driving school for computers, consisting of countless information to manage any situations, from the simplest to the most complex, guaranteeing millisecond response times.

Among the situations faced are, in particular, the location of other vehicles, pedestrians and cyclists, as well as interaction with other cars to avoid collisions and to know the traffic situation along the road in advance.

See you in 2025

All of these factors are extremely complex and drive engineers to work on algorithms that drive artificial intelligence associated with cameras, LiDAR and radar to follow and validate the various decision-making processes that the AI ​​makes, and then to make any corrections.

As mentioned above, the aim of the STADT:up project, which is led by Bosch and includes other companies related to the automotive industry, as well as technology partners, universities and research institutes, is to have a presentation of the technology by the end of 2025. and tests on open roads.