Development case study of the first estonian self-driving car, iseauto

Abstract

The rapid development of intelligent control technology has also brought about changes in the automotive industry and led to development of autonomous or self-driving vehicles. To overcome traffic and environment issues, self-driving cars use a number of sensors for vision as well as a navigation system and actuators to control mechanical systems and computers to process the data. All these points make a self-driving car an interdisciplinary project that requires contribution from different fields. In our particular case, four different university departments and two companies are directly involved in the self-driving car project. The main aim of the paper is to discuss the challenges faced in the development of the first Estonian self-driving car. The project implementation time was 20 months and the project included four work packages: preliminary study, software development, body assembly and system tuning/testing of the self-driving car. This paper describes the development process stages and tasks that were distributed between the sub-teams. Moreover, the paper presents the technical and software solutions that were used to achieve the goal and presents a self-driving last mile bus called ISEAUTO. Special attention is paid to the discussion of safety challenges that a self-driving electrical car project can encounter. The main outcomes and future research possibilities are outlined