Jona Ruof

Markus Schön, Jona Ruof, Thomas Wodtko et al.

Depth estimation is an essential task toward full scene understanding since it allows the projection of rich semantic information captured by cameras into 3D space. While the field has gained much attention recently, datasets for depth estimation lack scene diversity or sensor modalities. This work presents the ADUULM-360 dataset, a novel multi-modal dataset for depth estimation. The ADUULM-360 dataset covers all established autonomous driving sensor modalities, cameras, lidars, and radars. It covers a frontal-facing stereo setup, six surround cameras covering the full 360-degree, two high-resolution long-range lidar sensors, and five long-range radar sensors. It is also the first depth estimation dataset that contains diverse scenes in good and adverse weather conditions. We conduct extensive experiments using state-of-the-art self-supervised depth estimation methods under different training tasks, such as monocular training, stereo training, and full surround training. Discussing these results, we demonstrate common limitations of state-of-the-art methods, especially in adverse weather conditions, which hopefully will inspire future research in this area. Our dataset, development kit, and trained baselines are available at https://github.com/uulm-mrm/aduulm_360_dataset.

Robin Dehler, Oliver Schumann, Jona Ruof et al.

The integration of service-oriented architectures (SOA) with function offloading for distributed, intelligent transportation systems (ITS) offers the opportunity for connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) to extend their locally available services. One major goal of offloading a subset of functions in the processing chain of a CAV to remote devices is to reduce the overall computational complexity on the CAV. The extension of using remote services, however, requires careful safety analysis, since the remotely created data are corrupted more easily, e.g., through an attacker on the remote device or by intercepting the wireless transmission. To tackle this problem, we first analyze the concept of SOA for distributed environments. From this, we derive a safety framework that validates the reliability of remote services and the data received locally. Since it is possible for the autonomous driving task to offload multiple different services, we propose a specific multi-staged framework for safety analysis dependent on the service composition of local and remote services. For efficiency reasons, we directly include the multi-staged framework for safety analysis in our service-oriented function offloading framework (SOFOF) that we have proposed in earlier work. The evaluation compares the performance of the extended framework considering computational complexity, with energy savings being a major motivation for function offloading, and its capability to detect data from corrupted remote services.

Oliver Speidel, Jona Ruof, Klaus Dietmayer

Automated driving in urban scenarios requires efficient planning algorithms able to handle complex situations in real-time. A popular approach is to use graph-based planning methods in order to obtain a rough trajectory which is subsequently optimized. A key aspect is the generation of trajectories implementing comfortable and safe behavior already during graph-search while keeping computation times low. To capture this aspect, on the one hand, a branching strategy is presented in this work that leads to better performance in terms of quality of resulting trajectories and runtime. On the other hand, admissible heuristics are shown which guide the graph-search efficiently, where the solution remains optimal.

Maximilian Graf, Oliver Speidel, Jona Ruof et al.

The Institute of Measurement, Control and Microtechnology at Ulm University investigates advanced driver assistance systems for decades and concentrates in large parts on autonomous driving. It is well known that motion planning is a key technology for autonomous driving. It is first and foremost responsible for the safety of the vehicle passengers as well as of all surrounding traffic participants. However, a further task consists in providing a smooth and comfortable driving behavior. In Ulm, we have the grateful opportunity to test our algorithms under real conditions in public traffic and diversified scenarios. In this paper, we would like to give the readers an insight of our work, about the vehicle, the test track, as well as of the related problems, challenges and solutions. Therefore, we will describe the motion planning system and explain the implemented functionalities. Furthermore, we will show how our vehicle moves through public road traffic and how it deals with challenging scenarios like e.g. driving through roundabouts and intersections.