Making Bertha Drive-An Autonomous Journey on a Historic Route

• Published in: IEEE intelligent transportation systems magazine 2014, Vol.6 (2), p.8-20
• Main Authors: Ziegler, Julius, Bender, Philipp, Schreiber, Markus, Lategahn, Henning, Strauss, Tobias, Stiller, Christoph, Thao Dang, Franke, Uwe, Appenrodt, Nils, Keller, Christoph G., Kaus, Eberhard, Herrtwich, Ralf G., Rabe, Clemens, Pfeiffer, David, Lindner, Frank, Stein, Fridtjof, Erbs, Friedrich, Enzweiler, Markus, Knöppel, Carsten, Hipp, Jochen, Haueis, Martin, Trepte, Maximilian, Brenk, Carsten, Tamke, Andreas, Ghanaat, Mohammad, Braun, Markus, Joos, Armin, Fritz, Hans, Mock, Horst, Hein, Martin, Zeeb, Eberhard
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Applied sciences; Artificial intelligence; Automobiles; Automotive engineering; Autonomous; Autonomous vehicles; Computer science; control theory; systems; Control theory. Systems; Digital; Exact sciences and technology; Ground, air and sea transportation, marine construction; Historic; History; Journeys; Mechanical engineering. Machine design; Pattern recognition. Digital image processing. Computational geometry; Performance evaluation; Road transportation and traffic; Robotics; Traffic accidents & safety; Traffic engineering; Traffic flow; Wireless sensor systems
• ISSN: 1939-1390; 1941-1197
• DOI: 10.1109/MITS.2014.2306552

125 years after Bertha Benz completed the first overland journey in automotive history, the Mercedes Benz S-Class S 500 INTELLIGENT DRIVE followed the same route from Mannheim to Pforzheim, Germany, in fully autonomous manner. The autonomous vehicle was equipped with close-to-production sensor hardware and relied solely on vision and radar sensors in combination with accurate digital maps to obtain a comprehensive understanding of complex traffic situations. The historic Bertha Benz Memorial Route is particularly challenging for autonomous driving. The course taken by the autonomous vehicle had a length of 103 km and covered rural roads, 23 small villages and major cities (e.g. downtown Mannheim and Heidelberg). The route posed a large variety of difficult traffic scenarios including intersections with and without traffic lights, roundabouts, and narrow passages with oncoming traffic. This paper gives an overview of the autonomous vehicle and presents details on vision and radar-based perception, digital road maps and video-based self-localization, as well as motion planning in complex urban scenarios.