The Institute of Databases and Information Systems (DBIS) continues its long-term collaboration with Daimler AG. In the joint research project PRoTECT (PRedicting The driving behavior under varying Environmental ConsTraints), PhD student Florian Wirthmüller  will work in the field of autonomous driving, focussing on the utilization and anlysis of crowd and context data for predicting driving behavior.

Backgrounds

To enable modern cars to drive autonomously or to assist drivers properly in various scenarios and environments are some of the most challenging undertakings of our time. To realize this vision, cars need to analyze and understand their environment as well as the current traffic situation in real-time with high accuracy. In this context, prediction methods are required to enable the planning of a secure driving corridor. Though current Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) already enable such predictions, most of them only apply simple heuristics, utilizing the data directly provided by the sensor systems. The PRoTECT project, therefore, aims to improve prediction accuracies by additionally incorporating contextual information, i.e., information a human driver would conclude from the context of the situation and his knowledge thereof in order to adapt his behavior, e.g., to drive more carefully in the case of a slippery road. In addition, location-based particularities (e.g. crowded roads like in India or rectangular roads like in Manhattan) will be taken into account to broaden the use of driver assistance systems.