Ford Otosan and AVL continue their joint development of Autonomous Driving Solutions

AVL and Ford Otosan take the next step in their long-term cooperation in the development of automated driving of trucks.

Having successfully demonstrated truck platooning in Autumn 2019, the partners are now focused on highly automated driving on highways. The autonomous trucks that are being developed will have SAE L4 Highway Pilot technology that will eventually enable the logistics companies to deploy fully autonomous heavy-duty transportation between logistics hubs.

Lack of drivers worldwide and strong market demand for safer and
more efficient transportation solutions, deems the business case for L4
Highway Pilot highly beneficial. The development effort is significant
due to diverse weather conditions and various traffic situations that
need to be covered to guarantee safe driving just as a human driver
would do, yet with increased safety. Considering the number of possible
scenarios, AVL and Ford Otosan started the development of an autonomous
highway pilot system working on traffic scenarios that are more common
and are gradually increasing the complexity of those scenarios. Two Ford
Trucks F-MAX vehicles, equipped with best-in-class lidar, radar, camera
sensors, and processing platforms are already on the roads in Turkey
and Germany. These trucks are currently being used to collect data from
the roads, which is then being used to train and test Artificial
Intelligence-based perception and decision-making algorithms.

Ford Otosan and AVL will jointly develop the software stack
specified for the SAE L4 Highway Pilot functionality using
state-of-the-art approaches and development processes. Innovative and
systematic verification-validation methodologies will be applied for
highest maturity and safety of the developed automated driving features.
AVL will specifically contribute with its comprehensive knowledge in
software development by its engineering teams in Regensburg and
Istanbul, and Ford Otosan will strengthen the project with its expertise
in developing ADAS & Autonomous Driving systems for
heavy-commercial vehicles.

Sharing his expectation for the SAE L4 Highway Pilot technology, Ford Otosan Assistant General Manager Burak Gökçelik stated:
“In
the second phase of our R&D cooperation we aim to develop and test
SAE-Level 4 autonomous trucks that are designed to operate on highways
for fully autonomous hub-to-hub transportation. By automating a
significant portion of the heavy commercial transportation on the
highways, Ford Trucks will create value for fleet owners, drivers, end
customers, and the society with safer, faster, cheaper, greener, and more reliable transportation.”

Emphasizing the potential of automated H2H transport, AVL
Executive Vice President Rolf Dreisbach pointed out the following: “The
implementation of automated H2H transportation can scale down the
operating costs by up to 30% and can contribute to a significant
reduction in the number of accidents with trucks involved. We want to
support our customers with AVL's development strengths and innovative
approaches to implement
Automated Driving solutions for their best market positioning.”

In the first half of 2021, Ford Otosan and AVL aim to show the next
major step in their successful cooperation toward the development of
real H2H transportation.