Development of Software for Open Autonomous Automotive Systems in the Stadtpilot-Project

Following the successful participation in the DARPA Urban Challenge with the CarOLO-Project [1], the Stadtpilot-Project [2] aims at implementing and evaluating autonomous driving with passenger vehicles in regular urban traffic on the inner city ring road of Braunschweig. Transferring autonomous driving from an artificial urban environment as in the Urban Challenge1 in 2007 to regular urban traffic has a major impact on the quality requirements for both hardware and software systems to be developed. This paper focuses on the development process of the safety-critical software – including functions, architecture and tests for prototyping open autonomous systems in urban traffic. The key issue is to establish flexibility in development and openness for Car-to-Car (C2C) and Car-to-Infrastructure (C2I) communication while still guaranteeing a high level of safety. This paper points out new techniques and lessons learned used with respect to the current standards in the field of functional safety for automotive systems (esp. ISO/DIS 26262 [3]).