Lutz Eckstein

RWTH Aachen University · Institute of Automotive Engineering Aachen

The development of cooperative driving functions to optimize traffic systems shows high potential to improve individual autonomous driving systems with respect to topics like traffic flow, vehicle safety and user comfort. The core concept of the presented solutions is the Local Traffic System (LTS). Following the messages defined in European Teleco...

As automation in the field of automated driving (AD) progresses, ensuring the safety and functionality of AD functions (ADFs) becomes crucial. Virtual scenario-based testing has emerged as a prevalent method for evaluating these systems, allowing for a wider range of testing environments and reproducibility of results. This approach involves AD-equ...

In an increasingly automated world - from warehouse robots to self-driving cars - streamlining the development and deployment process and operations of robotic applications becomes ever more important. Automated DevOps processes and microservice architectures have already proven successful in other domains such as large-scale customer-oriented web...

The biggest challenge to overcome for automated vehicles is to prove their safety, as these vehicles are solely responsible for the passengers’ safety. The scenario-based testing approach promises an efficient safety validation procedure by only testing the safety in relevant scenarios. An open question is how to select the relevant scenarios for t...

The imperative for electrification of road transport, driven by global climate targets, underscores the need for innovative powertrain systems for heavy-duty vehicles. When developing new electric drive modules for heavy-duty vehicles, it is crucial to consider individual operational requirements instead of solely relying on generalized usage profi...

Future mobility systems and their components are increasingly defined by their software. The complexity of these cooperative intelligent transport systems (C-ITS) and the ever- changing requirements posed at the software require continual software updates. The dynamic nature of the system and the practically innumerable scenarios in which different...

Multi-modal 3D object detection models for automated driving have demonstrated exceptional performance on computer vision benchmarks like nuScenes. However, their reliance on densely sampled LiDAR point clouds and meticulously calibrated sensor arrays poses challenges for real-world applications. Issues such as sensor misalignment, miscalibra-tion,...

Connectivity is a main driver for the ongoing megatrend of automated mobility: future Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS) will connect road vehicles, traffic signals, roadside infrastructure, and even vulnerable road users, sharing data and compute for safer, more efficient, and more comfortable mobility. In terms of communication tec...

Automated vehicles offer many advantages, but also entail an increased risk of motion sickness. To avoid such an aversive experience, early and reliable detection of individual states of motion sickness is required to initiate appropriate countermeasures. To this end, a study was conducted to investigate different measures of motion sickness while...

With the introduction of novel automated vehicles (AVs), drivers are becoming passengers who could be susceptible to motion sickness symptoms in cars (carsickness). Therefore, it is advisable to adapt driving characteristics like accelerations, braking, lane change behaviors based on the sensitivity of the passengers. Physiological markers play an...

With advances in automated driving, the importance of the vehicle interior continues to grow. However, the growing number of functions leads to a large amount of information on automation or infotainment systems. To create an individual customer experience and not to overwhelm the driver with the growing amount of information, an adaptive human-mac...

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved state-of-the-art results on various computer vision tasks, including 3D object detection. However, their end-to-end implementation also makes ViTs less explainable, which can be a challenge for deploying them in safety-critical applications, such as autonomous driving, where it is important for authorities,...

Automated vehicles require an accurate perception of their surroundings for safe and efficient driving. Lidar-based object detection is a widely used method for environment perception, but its performance is significantly affected by adverse weather conditions such as rain and fog. In this work, we investigate various strategies for enhancing the r...

The presentation highlights the key architecture implementations developed in UNICARagil, a BMBF funded research project on autonomous driving. It introduces the four developed prototypes and additionally focuses on the service oriented software architecture (ASOA).

While the share of electric vehicles in the passenger car sector is steadily increasing, electrification in the commercial vehicle sector is progressing much slower. The reasons include lower production figures and an even stronger focus on efficiency and costs. When developing new powertrain systems, it is crucial to consider individual user and a...

Future mobility will be electrified, connected and automated. This opens completely new possibilities for mobility concepts that have the chance to improve not only the quality of life but also road safety for everyone. To achieve this, a transformation of the transportation system as we know it today is necessary. The UNICARagil project, which ran...

This presentation summarizes the project results of UNICARagil, a BMBF funded research project on architectures for automated driving.

In an increasingly automated world - from warehouse robots to self-driving cars - streamlining the development and deployment process and operations of robotic applications becomes ever more important. Automated DevOps processes and microservice architectures have already proven successful in other domains such as large-scale customer-oriented web...

In this contribution, a simulation chain for the thermo-mechanical and hydromechanical analysis (surface drainage) of a pavement structure during its whole service life is applied to a typical asphalt pavement (Bk100) used for motorways in Germany. Transient load signals for each tyre position of a truck-trailer combination (vehicle) are generated...

Modern cyber-physical systems (CPS) such as Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS) are increasingly defined by the software which operates these systems. In practice, microservice architectures can be employed, which may consist of containerized microservices running in a cluster comprised of robots and supporting infrastructure. These m...

Automated driving functions (ADFs) have become increasingly popular in recent years. However, their safety must be assured. Thus, the verification and validation of these functions is still an important open issue in research and development. To achieve this efficiently, scenario-based testing has been established as a valuable methodology among re...

Smart roadside infrastructure sensors in the form of intelligent transportation system stations (ITS-Ss) are increasingly deployed worldwide at relevant traffic nodes. The resulting digital twins of the real environment are suitable for developing and validating connected and automated driving functions and for increasing the operational safety of...

Scenario-based testing is becoming increasingly important in safety assurance for automated driving. However, comprehensive and sufficiently complete coverage of the scenario space requires significant effort and resources if using only real-world data. To address this issue, driving scenario generation methods are developed and used more frequentl...

This report on the project Level 2 hands-off (L2H-off), commissioned by VDA to fka GmbH with the three subcontractors Institute for Automotive Engineering (ika) of RWTH Aachen University, Chair of Ergonomics (LfE) of the Technical University of Munich and fka Silicon Valley Inc., has been composed with the intention to allow VDA and its members as...

A cost model for the estimation of production costs of permanent magnet synchronous machines (PMSM) is presented, which allows to alter design choices such as wire technology, winding layout, cooling system, materials and more. With the goal to make results reproducible by others, the methods are explained in detail and used data and assumptions ar...

The use of smart roadside infrastructure sensors is highly relevant for future applications of connected and automated vehicles. External sensor technology in the form of intelligent transportation system stations (ITS-Ss) can provide safety-critical real-time information about road users in the form of a digital twin. The choice of sensor setups h...

Cooperation of automated vehicles (AVs) can improve safety, efficiency and comfort in traffic. Digital twins of Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS) play an important role in monitoring, managing and improving traffic. Computing a live digital twin of traffic requires as input live perception data of preferably multiple connected entit...

Within the BMWK-funded project eTestHiL, a follow-up project of Concept ELV2 (funded by BMWi), a novel electrically driven axle (e-axle) is developed together with a suitable chassis design for a heavy-duty truck. This paper begins with the discussion of requirement sources for heavy duty vehicles, followed up by different transmission concepts for...

One of the current challenges of the automotive industry is the launch of automated vehicles. At SAE Level 4 (SAE J3016, 2021), the automation performs the entire driving task, including monitoring the environment on predefined ODDs. Thereby, the driver becomes a passenger who can use the driving time to pursue non-driving-related activities (NDRAs...

The noise, vibration and harshness (NVH) performance is becoming increasingly important in vehicle development. On the one hand, simulation-based investigations and optimizations are carried out to reduce development time and cost. On the other hand, experimental studies still need to be conducted to verify the actual performance or to investigate...

Enabling secure and reliable high-bandwidth low-latency connectivity between automated vehicles and external servers, intelligent infrastructure, and other road users is a central step in making fully automated driving possible. The availability of data interfaces, which allow this kind of connectivity, has the potential to distinguish artificial a...

In perception tasks of automated vehicles (AVs)data-driven have often outperformed conventional approaches.This motivated us to develop a data-driven methodology tocompute occupancy grid maps (OGMs) from lidar measurements.Our approach extends previous work such that the estimatedenvironment representation now contains an additional layer forcells...

This paper evaluates the potentials of dual-speed transmissions for battery-electric powertrains in different passenger vehicle segments. The evaluation takes into account the differing performance requirements as well as boundary conditions within these segments. Three design approaches, considering single and dual-speed transmission topologies as...

Presentation of a novel architecture for a Collective Memory for different cloud based applications to support automated driving features.

The present research gives an overview of the process of designing and building prototypes of electric axles for heavy-duty vehicles at the Institute for Automotive Engineering (ika) of RWTH Aachen University. This overview starts with a brief presentation on the road transport and logistics industry. The expected growth of this market motivates -...

Virtual test driving is a methodology to evaluate vehicle performance and environmental impacts under realistic driving conditions. This approach can generate comprehensive traffic information and trajectory data that reflect the dynamic and stochastic properties of transportation systems. Despite the benefits of virtual test driving, it is challen...

In order to investigate hysteresis friction separately from other friction contributions (mainly adhesive friction), linear friction tests are performed with cut out tread specimens from passenger car tires on 3D-printed sinusoidal surfaces under dry and wet conditions. In this work, a multiscale approach based on the finite element method (FEM) is...

The validation and verification of automated driving functions (ADFs) is a challenging task on the journey of making those functions available to the public beyond the current research context. Simulation is a valuable building block for scenario-based testing that can help to model traffic situations that are relevant for ADFs. In addition to the...

Over the past years, automated driving has moved towards a stage, where the public introduction of automated driving functions (ADF) seems conceivable. However, the question of verification and validation of these systems as well as assuring their safety is still a discussion among researchers, manufacturers, and authorities. Whilst the approach of...

A thermal model is presented which can be utilized to estimate the resulting temperatures in the components of a PMSM for different operation points and duty cycles. Different model types have been reviewed initially and the presented thermal model is realized in the form of a Lumped Parameter Thermal Model (LPTM). This model type was identified to...

Enabling secure and reliable high-bandwidth low-latency connectivity between automated vehicles and external servers, intelligent infrastructure, and other road users is a central step in making fully automated driving possible. The availability of data interfaces, which allow this kind of connec-tivity, has the potential to distinguish artificial...

Freight transport accounts for about half of all distances travelled in Europe. Therefore, freight transport is one of the decisive factors for reducing greenhouse gases and air pollutants. For this reason, the electrification of road freight transport is being promoted as part of the project “BEV Goes eHighway—[BEE]”. The data basis for the modell...

The use of infrastructure sensors has proven to be an effective method for recording large traffic datasets. In order to achieve a high data quality for such datasets, an accurate extrinsic calibration of the sensors is essential. While previous approaches are not fast enough or do not fit the use-case of infrastructure sensing, we present a method...

The spread of all-electric drives is steadily increasing in all sectors of road transport. Due to the constantly increasing demands on efficiency and performance by legislation and customers, it is necessary to continuously push the system limits of the powertrains. This paper presents an approach that performs an initial thermal system analysis ba...

The RGB complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) sensor works within the visible light spectrum. Therefore it is very sensitive to environmental light conditions. On the contrary, a long-wave infrared (LWIR) sensor operating in 8-14 µm spectral band, functions independent of visible light. In this paper, we exploit both visual and thermal per...