The Car of the Future Will be Autonomous and Safe

As part of the “MANNHEIM – AutoDevSafeOps” project, Stefan Wagner, Professor of Software Engineering at TUM Campus Heilbronn, worked with numerous colleagues on 80 technological building blocks to increase software safety in vehicles. The mammoth project was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space.

The title itself reveals the various research focuses that are now being considered together. First of all the “Development”, than “Operations” for the execution. Stefan Wagner added “Safety” in “Automotive” to the two fields. Until now, development and implementation have been carried out in different departments: “Some designed the software, others installed it and then complained when something didn’t work.” The aim of the project is to better integrate these areas and improve them further in real time.

Over-the-air Updates

Traditionally, updates for vehicle software were installed during a visit to the workshop. Now, this process is set to become faster and more effective: “Over-the-air updates enable us to shorten cycles. I evaluate the data, respond to feedback and modify my software immediately,” explains the researcher. This approach has long been established for smartphones, but Stefan Wagner is aware of the difficulties that road traffic entails: “Adjustments are not critical for infotainment. But if I’m not careful with vehicles and then a really important system stops working due to an update, that’s a huge problem. It can even cost lives.”

Information from the car can help here: “We are now collecting a lot of data in the vehicle and feeding it back into safety cases. It’s a matter of weighing up the opportunities and risks.” For this project component, which could also pave the way for safe autonomous driving, Wagner collaborated with Bosch, Humboldt University in Berlin, and the Fraunhofer Institute for Cognitive Systems (IKS) in Munich. Specifically, Bosch is currently developing a construction site assistant. The TUM professor points out what needs to be considered: “Autonomous driving already works very well on motorways, where unpredictable events are rare – but construction sites are a problem when there are suddenly yellow and white lines on the road, i.e. two in total. Lane assist systems have problems with this.”

Better Safe than Sorry

But in software, even small changes can have serious consequences. Wagner’s solution: “We tried to scale down the process to perform an incremental safety analysis. In doing so, we limited ourselves to only those things that had changed.” The team therefore attempts to map many of the requirements initially described in the safety analysis and measure whether they are being met. The data is sent back and any problems are identified. “This double-checking is verified during development and then in operation.”

And when it comes to safety-related issues, a lot of testing is done, of course – either in simulators or with test vehicles in real time at the German Aerospace Centre in Oldenburg. “The European approach is more to think carefully about how we ensure safety and take one step at a time. Especially when it comes to dangerous fields, I prefer this approach. We’d rather do it properly and really put our German engineering into practice.”

When Cars Communicate with Each Other

Therefore, it will take some time before robot taxis are on the roads in Europe – as they already are in the USA today.  However, Wagner believes that development is on the right track and that the ‘AutoDevSafeOps’ project is making an important contribution to this. “The focus is more on AI and the so-called ‘systems of systems’ approach. This means that we are not just looking at our own car, but at the entire system, including other cars, road users, traffic lights, etc., which can communicate with the car.” The amount of data can be a problem: “It has to be stored, downloaded from the vehicle and then evaluated – and all this on a mobile device that does not always have a good and free data connection – a real challenge."

Overall, the scientist takes a positive view of developments in road traffic: “Despite all the criticism, cars have become much safer. The number of accident fatalities and injuries continues to decline. It is unimaginable how many people died in accidents in the past.” And the road to autonomous driving is not far off either: “I see us at 80 per cent, so there’s not much left to go and we’ll definitely keep at it. That’s why we’re currently working on a possible follow-up project.”