Paper ID: 2309.15492

EDGAR: An Autonomous Driving Research Platform -- From Feature Development to Real-World Application

Phillip Karle, Tobias Betz, Marcin Bosk, Felix Fent, Nils Gehrke, Maximilian Geisslinger, Luis Gressenbuch, Philipp Hafemann, Sebastian Huber, Maximilian Hübner, Sebastian Huch, Gemb Kaljavesi, Tobias Kerbl, Dominik Kulmer, Tobias Mascetta, Sebastian Maierhofer, Florian Pfab, Filip Rezabek, Esteban Rivera, Simon Sagmeister, Leander Seidlitz, Florian Sauerbeck, Ilir Tahiraj, Rainer Trauth, Nico Uhlemann, Gerald Würsching, Baha Zarrouki, Matthias Althoff, Johannes Betz, Klaus Bengler, Georg Carle, Frank Diermeyer, Jörg Ott, Markus Lienkamp

While current research and development of autonomous driving primarily focuses on developing new features and algorithms, the transfer from isolated software components into an entire software stack has been covered sparsely. Besides that, due to the complexity of autonomous software stacks and public road traffic, the optimal validation of entire stacks is an open research problem. Our paper targets these two aspects. We present our autonomous research vehicle EDGAR and its digital twin, a detailed virtual duplication of the vehicle. While the vehicle's setup is closely related to the state of the art, its virtual duplication is a valuable contribution as it is crucial for a consistent validation process from simulation to real-world tests. In addition, different development teams can work with the same model, making integration and testing of the software stacks much easier, significantly accelerating the development process. The real and virtual vehicles are embedded in a comprehensive development environment, which is also introduced. All parameters of the digital twin are provided open-source at https://github.com/TUMFTM/edgar_digital_twin.

Submitted: Sep 27, 2023