The 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge afforded the golden opportunity for the Technische Universität Braunschweig to demonstrate its abilities to develop an autonomously driving vehicle to compete with the world's best. After several stages of qualification, our team CarOLO qualified early for the DARPA Urban Challenge Final Event and was among only 11 teams from initially 89 competitors to compete in the final. We had the ability to work together in a large group of experts, each contributing his expertise in his discipline, and significant organizational, financial, and technical support by local sponsors, who helped us to become the best non‐U.S. team. In this report, we describe the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge, our contribution, “Caroline,” the technology, and algorithms, along with her performance in the DARPA Urban Challenge Final Event on November 3, 2007.

The Stadtpilot project aims at autonomous driving on Braunschweig's inner city ring road. For this purpose, an autonomous vehicle called “Leonie” has been developed. In October 2010, after two years of research, “Leonie's” abilities were presented in a public demonstration. This vehicle is one of the first worldwide to show the ability of driving autonomously in real urban traffic scenarios. This paper describes the legal issues and the homologation process for driving autonomously in public traffic in Braunschweig, Germany. It also dwells on the Safety Concept, the system architecture and current research activities.

The Stadtpilot project aims at fully automated driving on Braunschweig's inner city ring road. The TU Braunschweig's research vehicle Leonie is one of the first vehicles having the ability of fully automated driving in real urban traffic scenarios. In this paper, we present our approaches for context representation and environment modeling for automated driving. The demonstrated approach allows to provide a simple and yet universal information storage layer for the development of complex driving applications. Moreover, we present our approach for aggregating and fusing information between dynamic traffic objects detected by the sensor systems and a-priori map information.

The majority of the ground vehicles operating on the airside parts of commercial airports are currently powered by diesel engines. These include vehicles such as apron buses, fuel trucks, and aircraft tractors. Hence, these vehicles contribute to the overall CO ${}_2$ emissions of the aviation transport system and thus negatively influence its environmental footprint. To reduce this damaging environmental impact, these vehicles could potentially be electrified with on-board batteries as their energy sources. However, the conductive charging of such vehicles via stationary cable connections is rather time-consuming. A dynamic wireless charging system to supply public transportation passenger buses with electric energy while in motion has recently been installed on the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) campus and in the Korean city of Gumi. In this paper, we study configuration problems related to the use of this technology to make airport operations more environmentally sustainable. We concentrate on the power supply for apron buses and analyze the location planning problems related to the distribution of the required power supply and the wireless charging units in the apron road system. To this end, we develop a formal optimization model and discuss the first numerical results.

Autonomous driving in urban environments is potentially dangerous since a malfunction of vehicle guidance systems can lead to severe situations for passengers inside the autonomous vehicle and other road users. Therefore both, monitoring the current system operation state by a surveillance system, which is able to detect failures of software and hardware modules, and a safety system, which reacts on these failures immediately, is necessary. In this paper an approach based on performance criteria and functional degradation is proposed, which is used in the autonomous vehicle Leonie developed within the Stadtpilot project. The surveillance part of the system collects data from sensors, software modules, hardware, and the vehicle to combine this data with heuristics to performance criteria. Based on these criteria degradation actions are executed to keep the operation of Leonie in a safe state. The safety system can influence driving maneuvers like lane changes and turning maneuvers, modify driving parameters like maximum speed and safe time headway and even force driving maneuvers like emergency stops and controlled stops at the side of the road. Currently, the safety driver onboard of Leonie is the fallback solution in case of a system malfunction. Using the proposed safety system should reduce the number of situations where the safety driver has to take control over the vehicle though.

Mitochondrial dysfunction in heart failure includes greater susceptibility to mitochondrial permeability transition (MPT), which may worsen cardiac function and decrease survival. Treatment with a mixture of the n3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (n3 PUFAs) docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) is beneficial in heart failure patients and increases resistance to MPT in animal models. We assessed whether DHA and EPA have similar effects when given individually, and whether they prolong survival in heart failure. Male δ-sarcoglycan null cardiomyopathic hamsters were untreated or given either DHA, EPA, or a 1:1 mixture of DHA + EPA at 2.1% of energy intake. Treatment did not prolong survival: mean survival was 298 ± 15 days in untreated hamsters and 335 ± 17, 328 ± 14, and 311 ± 15 days with DHA, EPA, and DHA + EPA, respectively ( n = 27–32/group). A subgroup of cardiomyopathic hamsters treated for 26 wk had impaired left ventricular function and increased cardiomyocyte apoptosis compared with normal hamsters, which was unaffected by n3 PUFA treatment. Evaluation of oxidative phosphorylation in isolated subsarcolemmal and interfibrillar mitochondria with substrates for complex I or II showed no effect of n3 PUFA treatment. On the other hand, interfibrillar mitochondria from cardiomyopathic hamsters were significantly more sensitive to Ca²⁺-induced MPT, which was completely normalized by treatment with DHA and partially corrected by EPA. In conclusion, treatment with DHA or EPA normalizes Ca²⁺-induced MPT in cardiomyopathic hamsters but does not prolong survival or improve cardiac function. This suggest that greater susceptibility to MPT is not a contributor to cardiac pathology and poor survival in heart failure.