From Autonomous Vehicles to Safer Cars: Selected Challenges for the Software Engineering

Paper in proceeding, 2012

In November 2007, the DARPA Urban Challenge took place on the former George Airforce base in Victorville, California. Within that competition, teams from all-over the world had to demonstrate the autonomous driving capabilities from their robot cars in an urban-like environment. From initially 89 competitors, only eleven qualied for the final event wherein "Boss" from Carnegie Mellon finally won the race. In this article, a short overview over European's best team "CarOLO" and its vehicle "Caroline" within that competition is outlined. Based on the experiences from that competition, remaining challenges for the software engineering are described to realize safer cars in the future.