Related papers: Performance Boundary Identification for the Evalua…

Automated driving is an active area of research in both industry and academia. Automated Parking, which is automated driving in a restricted scenario of parking with low speed manoeuvring, is a key enabling product for fully autonomous…

Simulation is essential to validate autonomous driving systems. However, a simple simulation, even for an extremely high number of simulated miles or hours, is not sufficient. We need well-founded criteria showing that simulation does…

Bayesian learning using Gaussian processes provides a foundational framework for making decisions in a manner that balances what is known with what could be learned by gathering data. In this dissertation, we develop techniques for…

Continuous-time batch state estimation using Gaussian processes is an efficient approach to estimate the trajectories of robots over time. In the past, relatively simple physics-motivated priors have been considered for such approaches,…

Automated driving functions (ADFs) have become increasingly popular in recent years. However, their safety must be assured. Thus, the verification and validation of these functions is still an important open issue in research and…

While motion planning approaches for automated driving often focus on safety and mathematical optimality with respect to technical parameters, they barely consider convenience, perceived safety for the passenger and comprehensibility for…

Many robotic tasks, such as human-robot interactions or the handling of fragile objects, require tight control and limitation of appearing forces and moments alongside sensible motion control to achieve safe yet high-performance operation.…

Systems and functions that rely on machine learning (ML) are the basis of highly automated driving. An essential task of such ML models is to reliably detect and interpret unusual, new, and potentially dangerous situations. The detection of…

The verification and validation of automated driving systems at SAE levels 4 and 5 is a multi-faceted challenge for which classical statistical considerations become infeasible. For this, contemporary approaches suggest a decomposition into…

Parameter estimation is crucial for modeling, tracking, and control of complex dynamical systems. However, parameter uncertainties can compromise system performance under a controller relying on nominal parameter values. Typically,…

This paper considers the quantification of the prediction performance in Gaussian process regression. The standard approach is to base the prediction error bars on the theoretical predictive variance, which is a lower bound on the mean…

This paper presents an adaptive high performance control method for autonomous miniature race cars. Racing dynamics are notoriously hard to model from first principles, which is addressed by means of a cautious nonlinear model predictive…

Efficient trajectory planning for urban intersections is currently one of the most challenging tasks for an Autonomous Vehicle (AV). Courteous behavior towards other traffic participants, the AV's comfort and its progression in the…

In the field of reinforcement learning there has been recent progress towards safety and high-confidence bounds on policy performance. However, to our knowledge, no practical methods exist for determining high-confidence policy performance…

Many safety-critical real-world problems, such as autonomous driving and collaborative robots, are of a distributed multi-agent nature. To optimize the performance of these systems while ensuring safety, we can cast them as distributed…

Connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) provide the most intriguing opportunity for enabling users to monitor transportation network conditions and make better decisions for improving safety and transportation efficiency. In this paper, we…

Model predictive control allows to provide high performance and safety guarantees in the form of constraint satisfaction. These properties, however, can be satisfied only if the underlying model, used for prediction, of the controlled…

Driving under varying road conditions is challenging, especially for autonomous vehicles that must adapt in real-time to changes in the environment, e.g., rain, snow, etc. It is difficult to apply offline learning-based methods in these…

Gaussian Processes (GPs) are a generic modelling tool for supervised learning. While they have been successfully applied on large datasets, their use in safety-critical applications is hindered by the lack of good performance guarantees. To…

Evaluation and testing are critical for the development of Automated Vehicles (AVs). Currently, companies test AVs on public roads, which is very time-consuming and inefficient. We proposed the Accelerated Evaluation concept which uses a…