Autonomous Driving in the Real-World: The Weather Challenge in the Sohjoa Baltic Project

Book chapter, 2021

Autonomous driving is becoming increasingly popular worldwide. Currently, there is a high number of successful use cases and pilot projects around the world, but the market solutions are limited to restricted areas and advanced driving assistance systems. The main reason is the challenging shift from simulation and test tracks to the real world, where the number of possible scenarios increases exponentially, thus increasing the complexity of the driving models. In consideration of such a complex environment, this chapter focuses on the description of the real-world challenges in connection to running pilots within the Sohjoa Baltic project. Sohjoa Baltic aims at piloting electric autonomous minibuses in several cities of the Baltic sea region, constituting a challenging testbed compared to other cities piloting autonomous driving. The chapter gives a scientific interpretation to a series of practical problems, describing the challenges encountered during the running pilots in the Sohjoa Baltic project, reviewing state-of-the-art solutions and future implementation ideas that can be used on each vehicle or in the infrastructure.