STADT:up Project: Opel Advances Automated Driving in Urban Areas

• Pioneering project STADT:up develops concepts and pilot applications for automated driving in complex city traffic
• Stellantis representative Opel participates in joint project as AI development partner
• Demonstration of complex environment recognition in the city by Opel vehicle prototype by end of 2025

Project STADT:up (Solutions and Technologies for Automated Driving in Town: an urban-mobility project) aims to take a big step closer to the goal of enabling automated driving in urban areas by the end of 2025. As the German brand in Stellantis, Opel is involved in the project funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action. The experts at the Rüsselsheim Engineering Center play an important role in the further development of vehicle environment recognition based on artificial intelligence (AI) and the translation into the situation-specific reaction in automated driving. Now the kick-off event of the consortium project with 22 project and development partners took place on the campus of Robert Bosch GmbH in Renningen, Germany. In addition, Opel aims to demonstrate an innovative prototype featuring complex environment recognition in urban areas by the end of 2025.

“By participating in the STADT:up project, Opel, as our German brand, is further advancing automated driving in urban traffic, on behalf of Stellantis. The engineers at the Rüsselsheim Engineering Center draw on many years of experience in this field. At the same time, we are strengthening our good cooperation with research institutions outside the company and continuing our commitment to supporting young scientists,” said Frank Jordan, Stellantis, Head of Innovation Germany.

Project goal: Demonstration of autonomous urban mobility with test vehicles

STADT:up is aimed at end-to-end, scalable solutions for future urban mobility. The vehicles must also be able to handle complex inner-city traffic scenarios safely and respond adequately to all situations within milliseconds. The various tasks for autonomous driving range from the comprehensive perception of the environment and the localisation of road users through the prediction, interaction and cooperation with other vehicles, to the behaviour and manoeuvre planning of the user’s own vehicle. The question of how mixed traffic consisting of pedestrians, cyclists, differently used vehicles and local public transport will develop is also of central importance. Correspondingly, suitable future concepts and the requirements derived from the needs of the users will also be developed in the project.

Key factors are the preparation and programming of the vehicle systems such as camera, LiDAR and radar to all possible scenarios until they are implemented in the computer system. This is where the AI experts at the Rüsselsheim site come into play. In addition to improving AI algorithms for perception and fusion, the team led by Dr. Nikolas Wagner and project manager Frank Bonarens places a special focus on the analysis and management of particularly challenging traffic situations. In addition to improving robustness, the aim of the research activities is to improve the traceability of the decisions of deep neural networks and to use them to check the plausibility of an automated driving system. This is intended to provide important building blocks for environment recognition in highly automated driving and to contribute to the efficient testing and validation of safety-relevant AI functions.

With the participation of the Rüsselsheim AI experts from the Stellantis research network, a long-standing Opel tradition of pre-competitive cooperation is continued. As with other research projects, the central pillars are the cooperation with renowned scientific partners from leading universities and research institutions as well as the doctoral program at the Rüsselsheim site.

In addition to automotive companies, leading suppliers as well as technology partners, universities and research institutions are represented in the consortium project led by Bosch. The highlight will be the final event planned for the end of 2025 with the joint presentation of the demonstrators developed in STADT:up. Opel's goal is to demonstrate the performance of the environment recognition system with its own test vehicle.