TUM Autonomous Motorsport

Contact: Simon Hoffmann, M.Sc.

The Idea

After successfully participating in the Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC) and the Autonomous Challenge at CES  2022 (IAC@CES) 2023 and 2024, as well as in Monza, Italy during the MIMO Motorshow 2023,  our team has decided to continue demonstrating the current state of research in autonomous motorsports. This year in April, the inaugural race of the Autonomous Racing League A2RL will be held in Abu Dhabi. This competition focuses on road course multi vehicle races and gives therefor more importance to the interaction between the race cars.

The Goal

The ultimate goal is to further improve our existing software and to demonstrate the potential of the software on the race track. To achieve this goal, subprojects are being worked on, each of which contributes to the overall software architecture of the vehicle. The focus is on the one hand on interactive trajectory planning with several vehicles on the dynamic limit, and on the other hand on environment perception and localization at high speeds. To achieve these goals, on the one hand the behavior of the opposing racing vehicle has to be predicted quickly and reliably, on the other hand the vehicle's driving dynamic limit has to be determined. The test drives with the racing vehicles, a Dallara IL-15 and a Dallara Super Formula, are then used to evaluate the real-time capability, performance and reliability of the new algorithms.

The Team

The Technical University of Munich (TUM) has decided to participate in the Indy Autonomous Challenge with its own team based on the knowledge of various institutes. The team will develop various functions for the operation of the autonomous racing car and subsequently evaluate them. The team consists of the following members:

Sponsoring

The TUM Autonomous Motorsport Team is supported in this research project by numerous companies and sponsors, which are listed below:

Scientific Publications

Betz, J.; Wischnewski, A.; Heilmeier, A.; Nobis, F.; Stahl, T.; Hermansdorfer, L.; Lohmann, B.; Lienkamp, M.; „What can we learn form autonomous level 5 Motorsport?“ at the 10th international Chassis Symposium “Chassis.Tech Plus 2019”, Munich, Juni 2018, doi: 10.1007/978-3-658-22050-1_12

Heilmeier, A.; Graf, M.; Lienkamp, M.;"A Race Simulation for Strategy Decisions in Circuit Motorsports" at the 21th International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC) 2018, Hawaii, October 2018,doi: 10.1109/ITSC.2018.8570012

Heilmeier, A.; Wischnewski, A.; Hermansdorfer, L.; Betz, J.; Lienkamp, M.; Lohmann, B.:"Minimum curvature trajectory planning and control for an autonomous race car" in Vehicle System Dynamics -  International Journal of Vehicle Mechanics and Mobility, pp. 1–31, June 2019, doi: 10.1080/00423114.2019.1631455

Stahl, T.; Wischnewski, A.; Betz, J.; Lienkamp, M: “ROS-based localization of a race vehicle at high-speed using LIDAR“ in E3S Web of Conferences, vol. 95, p. 4002, 2019, doi: 10.1051/e3sconf/20199504002

Betz, J.; Wischnewski, A.; Heilmeier, A.; Nobis, F.; Stahl, T.; Hermansdorfer, L.; Lienkamp, M.; „A Software Architecture for an Autonomous Racecar“ at the 89th Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC2019-Spring), Kuala Lumpur, 2019, doi: 10.1109/VTCSpring.2019.8746367

Nobis, F.; Betz, J. ; Hermansdorfer, L.; Lienkamp, M.: “Autonomous Racing: A Comparison of SLAM Algorithms for Large Scale Outdoor Environments“ in Proceedings of the 2019 3rd International Conference on Virtual and Augmented Reality Simulations - ICVARS ’19, 2019, doi: 10.1145/3332305.3332319

Palafox, P.;  Betz, J.; Nobis, F.; Riedl, K.; Lienkamp, M.:  "Fusing Semantic Segmentation and Monocular Depth Estimation for Enabling Autonomous Driving in Roads Without Lane Lines" in Sensors, vol. 19, no. 14, p. 3224, Jul. 2019,  doi: 10.3390/s19143224

Heilmeier, A.; Geisslinger, M.; Betz, J.;"A Quasi-Steady-State Lap Time Simulation for Electrified Race Cars" at the 14th International Conference on Ecological Vehicles and Renewable Energies (EVER2019), Monaco, 2019, doi: 10.1109/EVER.2019.8813646

Wischnewski, A.; Stahl, T.; Betz, J.; Lohmann, B.; „Vehicle Dynamics State Estimation and Localization for High Performance Race Cars “ IFAC-PapersOnLine, vol. 52, no. 8, pp. 154–161, 2019, doi: 10.1016/j.ifacol.2019.08.064

Stahl, T.; Wischnewski, A.; Betz, J.; Lienkamp, M: “Multilayer Graph-Based Trajectory Planning for Race Vehicles in Dynamic Scenarios“ in 2019 IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference (ITSC), 2019, doi: 10.1109/ITSC.2019.8917032

Hermansdorfer, L.; Betz, J.; Lienkamp, M: “ A Concept for Estimation and Prediction of the Tire-Road Friction Potential for an Autonomous Racecar“ in 2019 IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference (ITSC), 2019, doi: 10.1109/ITSC.2019.8917024

Herrmann, T.; Christ, F.; Betz, J.; Lienkamp, M: “Energy Management Strategy for an Autonomous Electric Racecar using Optimal Control “ in 2019 IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference (ITSC), 2019, doi: 10.1109/ITSC.2019.8917154

Wischnewski, A.; Betz, J.; Lohmann, B.: “A Model-Free Algorithm to Safely Approach the Handling Limit of an Autonomous Racecar“ in 2019 IEEE International Conference on Connected Vehicles and Expo (ICCVE 2019), Graz, Austria , 2019, doi: 10.1109/ICCVE45908.2019.8965218

Betz, J.; Wischnewski, A.; Heilmeier, A., Nobis, F.; Stahl, T.; Hermansdorfer, L.; Herrmann, T.; Lienkamp, M.;: “A Software Architecture for the Dynamic Path Planning of an Autonomous Racecar at the Limits of Handling“ in 2019 IEEE International Conference on Connected Vehicles and Expo (ICCVE 2019), doi: 10.1109/ICCVE45908.2019.8965238

Nobis, F.; Geisslinger, M.; Weber, M.; Betz, J.; Lienkamp, M.: "Learning-based Radar and Camera Sensor Fusion Architecture for Object Detection," in 2019 Sensor Data Fusion: Trends, Solutions, Applications (SDF), doi: 10.1109/SDF.2019.8916629

Christ, F.; Wischnewski, A.; Heilmeier, A.; Lohmann, B.: "Time-Optimal Trajectory Planning for a Race Car Considering Variable Tire-Road Friction Coefficients" in  Vehicle System Dynamics - International Journal of Vehicle Mechanics and Mobility, doi: 10.1080/00423114.2019.1704804

Betz, J.; Heilmeier, A.; Wischnewski, A.; Stahl, T.; Lienkamp, M.;: “Autonomous Driving - A Crash Explained in Detail“ in Applied Sciences, vol. 9, no. 23, p. 5126, Nov. 2019, https://doi.org/10.3390/app9235126

Stahl, T.; Betz. J; Diermeyer, F. : “Runtime Verification Concept for Autonomous Vehicles – Exemplary Study for the Planning Module of an Autonomous Race Vehicle“ in 23^rd IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC), September 2020, Rhodes, Greece, accepted, Fulltext (Preprint)

Nobis, F.; Betz. J; Lienkamp, M.: “Exploring the Capabilities and Limits of 3D Monocular Object Detection - A Study on Simulation and Real World Data“ in 23^rd IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC), September 2020, Rhodes, Greece, accepted, Fulltext (Preprint)

Herrmann, T.; Passigato, F.; Betz. J; Lienkamp, M.: “Minimum Race-Time Control-Strategy for an Autonomous Electric Racecar“ in 23^rd IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC), September 2020, Rhodes, Greece, accepted, Fulltext (Preprint)

Stahl, T.; Betz. J: “A Scenario Generator for Evaluating Path Planning Algorithms for Autonomous Driving” in 15th International Conference on Ecological Vehicles and Renewable Energies (EVER2020), May 2020, Monaco, France, accepted, Fulltext (Preprint)

Nobis, F.; Papanikolaoi, O.; Betz, J.; Lienkamp, M: “Persistent Map Saving for Visual Localization for Autonomous Vehicles: An ORB-SLAM Extension” in 15th International Conference on Ecological Vehicles and Renewable Energies (EVER2020), May 2020, Monaco, France, accepted, Fulltext(Preprint)

Hermansdorfer, L.; Betz, J.; Lienkamp, M: “Benchmarking of a software stack for autonomous racing against a professional human race driver” in 15th International Conference on Ecological Vehicles and Renewable Energies (EVER2020), May 2020, Monaco, France, accepted, Fulltext(Preprint)

Heilmeier, A.; Graf, M.; Betz, J.; Lienkamp, M.: ““Application of Monte Carlo Methods to Consider Probabilistic Effects in a Race Simulation for Circuit Motorsport,” Applied Sciences, vol. 10, no. 12, p. 4229, Jun. 2020, doi: https://doi.org/10.3390/app10124229

Heilmeier, A.; Thomaser, A.; Graf, M.; Betz, J.: “Virtual Strategy Engineer: Using Artificial Neural Networks for Making Race Strategy Decisions in Circuit Motorsport,” Applied Sciences, vol. 10, no. 21, p. 7805, Nov. 2020, doi: https://doi.org/10.3390/app10217805

Wischnewski, A.; Betz, J.; Lohmann, B.: „Real-Time Learning of Non-Gaussian Uncertainty Models for Autonomous Racing“ in 59th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), Jeju Island, Republic of Korea, December 2020, accepted

Herrmann, T.; Wischnewski, A.; Hermansdorfer, L.; Betz, J.; Lienkamp, M.: „Real-Time Adaptive Velocity Optimization for Autonomous Electric Race Cars“ in IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles, under Review

Hermandorfer, L.; Trauth, R.; Betz, J.; Lienkamp, M.: „End-to-End Neural Network vor Vehicle Dynamics Modeling“ in 3^rd IEEE Conference on Optimization and Modeling of Complex Systems, Agadir, Morocco, December 2020, under review