Strengthening their partnership further, two German technology suppliers Continental and Knorr-Bremse have jointly developed the platooning demonstrator, based on a platoon of three trucks of different makes.
Initial test runs and demonstrations to customers have already been conducted at testing grounds, Continental said in a release.
With the platooning demonstrator, the partners will show what driving functions they can develop, jointly with the vehicle manufacturers for automated driving.
This includes the formation of platoons, driving together, the emergency braking function, exiting by individual vehicles and safe splitting up of the entire platoon.
“With the Platooning Demonstrator, we’ve reached the first milestone of our joint work. The focus now is on exchanging ideas with the vehicle manufacturers for further development of the system solution in line with the product strategies of the customers”, says Gilles Mabire, Head of the Commercial Vehicles & Aftermarket Business Unit at Continental.
“Flexibility and openness when it comes to customer requirements and implementation routes is the key to our success. That’s why we’re keen to have close communication with our customers. It means we can present our roadmaps for products and functions, create vehicle demonstrators and react quickly to align our work with customer needs and market requirements,” adds Peter Laier, Member of the Board at Knorr-Bremse AG and responsible for its commercial vehicles division.
The partners are also gearing up for further development work on automated driving on highways, the so-called Highway Pilot.
Continental will be responsible for the sensors: The very latest sensor technologies are installed, including cameras and radar and lidar sensors.
To process the sensor signals – including those with data from other vehicles (V2V) or on the traffic infrastructure (V2X) – a development environment is initially being used for the Demonstrator.
To do so, the model of the respective environment too is created from the data, enabling self-orientation of the truck.
In future, the system will use the central “Assisted & Automated Driving Control Unit” (ADCU) from Continental and “Global Scalable Brake Control” (GSBC) from Knorr-Bremse to supply the input for the driving strategy.
For planning the trajectory, Knorr-Bremse is contributing its expertise in the specific requirements placed on commercial vehicle dynamics.
On top of that, Knorr-Bremse is implementing the requirements for driving stability (“Motion Control”) and for the actuator level, i.e. converting the driver’s decision into specific control processes inside the vehicle, and actuating steering and braking for longitudinal and lateral control.
Finally, Knorr-Bremse is also handling system integration, including validation.