U-Shift IV: Innovations and Challenges in Autonomous Urban Mobility

Abstract

The U-Shift IV represents the latest evolution in modular urban mobility solutions, offering significant advancements over its predecessors. This innovative vehicle concept introduces a distinct separation between the drive module, known as the driveboard, and the transport capsules. The driveboard contains all the necessary components for autonomous driving, allowing it to operate independently. This separation not only enables versatile applications - such as easily swapping capsules for passenger or goods transportation - but also significantly improves the utilization of the driveboard. By allowing a single driveboard to be paired with different capsules, operational efficiency is maximized, enabling continuous deployment of driveboards while the individual capsules are in use. The primary focus of U-Shift IV was to obtain a permit for operating at the Federal Garden Show 2023. To achieve this goal, we built the vehicle around the specific requirements for semi-public road operations which includes narrow streets and pedestrians. This involved integrating necessary modifications across multiple domains, including the e/e-architecture, sensor setup, software stack, and even the design of the driveboard and capsule. By utilizing systematic methods to address regulatory and safety challenges, we ensured that the vehicle met the standards required for autonomous driving in semi-public environments. In this paper, we explore the methodologies employed to achieve regulatory compliance, focusing on sensor integration, software- and e/e-architecture. We discuss our multi-modal sensor setup, which combines camera, lidar and radar to archive redundancy and enhanced environmental perception. Additionally, we provide an overview of our software architecture, emphasizing its role in ensuring safe driving functions and enabling autonomous operations.