On February 23, 2016, the 2nd Open AutoDrive forum took place at HERE (Germany) with participants from 35 international companies, including car manufacturers, system providers, map and service providers. The unique composition of the participants representing the stakeholders of all relevant fields for autonomous driving was a major factor for the success of the meeting.
This time, the keynote speech was given by Volvo Cars. As BMW in the meeting before, Volvo Cars motivated the need for collaboration in the field of autonomous driving. After an update of the activities in the ADASIS, NDS and SENSORIS consortia, the results of the follow-up activities of the 1st Open AutoDrive meeting on December 15, 2015 were presented: Major progress was achieved towards an agreed ecosystem architecture allowing each stakeholder to position himself and his business. The ecosystem architecture was also used to clarify the role of the existing standardisation initiatives (including TISA TPEG), to identify room for improvements of the standards and to elaborate combinations/extensions to the benefit of a future ecosystem. Furthermore, the results of a task force initiated at the 1st meeting on functional safety requirements for HAD maps was presented. The aspects of the maps to be considered and the validation measures are now better understood, allowing the dedicated experts to propose solutions.
As in the first meeting, the most interesting topics were subject of parallel breakout sessions. In one of the sessions, the ecosystem architecture was confirmed again and two interfaces were identified that will jointly be worked out in the next step. The session on functional safety and maps identified, based in the results as presented previously, three major topics to further work on until the next Open AutoDrive Forum: End-to-end protection of selected communication paths in the ecosystem architecture, metadata for map quality representation and audits/assessments of map production processes. The third session focussed on localization approaches. It first addressed the question whether the known localization approaches are mature enough for commercial use. It was further discussed whether the corresponding map representations should be subject of standardisation now or whether they are to be considered as distinctive features in the market for the time being. The car manufacturers committed to keep on driving the harmonization of different approaches and the respective standardizations.
The presentations in the 2nd Open AutoDrive Forum illustrated the big progress since the 1st Open AutoDrive meeting and identified important follow-up activities in dedicated expert groups. We are looking forward to the 3rd Open AutoDrive Forum in which the results will be presented to the plenum. The 3rd Open AutoDrive Forum will be hosted by TomTom on April 12 in Amsterdam (The Netherlands).