Mercedes-Benz S-Klasse INTELLIGENT DRIVE fährt autonom auf ...

Development, a role in which he initiated the autonomous driving project.
"However, it is not our intention that the vehicle should master every situation
on its own. If, for example, the road is blocked by a refuse collection vehicle, we
certainly don't want the vehicle to automatically overtake it, especially as the
vision of the vehicle's sensors is restricted in such a case. In such a situation, the
vehicle passes control back to the driver."
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For the company, the success of the autonomous road tests lies above all in
having identified those areas on which the development team needs to
concentrate in future. "We now know where we can make further improvements
and refinements to the vehicle's repertoire of programmed manoeuvres, i.e. the
situation-dependent control commands for steering, engine and brakes, such as
how to autonomously negotiate a roundabout." A further challenge is to correctly
locate the vehicle on the road, in order to determine, for example, precisely
where a vehicle should stop at a junction while at the same time having a view of
cross-traffic.
A particular challenge for autonomous vehicles is the way in which they
communicate and interact with other road users. Coming to an agreement with
an oncoming vehicle on who should proceed first around an obstruction is
something that requires a very great deal of situational analysis. "Where a
human driver might boldly move forward into a gap, our autonomous vehicle
tends to adopt a more cautious approach," says Herrtwich. "This sometimes
results in comical situations, such as when, having stopped at a zebra crossing,
the vehicle gets waved through by the pedestrian – yet our car stoically
continues to wait, because we failed to anticipate such politeness when we
programmed the system."
To enable the developers to reconstruct the decisions made by the autonomous
research vehicle in individual driving situations, the car makes recordings of all
its sensor data. Images from the stereo camera alone generate 300 gigabytes of
data every hour. Also in later standard operation, some of these data will
continue to be stored. That's because if, for example, an autonomous vehicle is
involved in an accident, this information will make it possible to establish what
happened.
Daimler Communications, 70546 Stuttgart/Germany
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