Guided by a tablet: Autonomous driving in Porsche’s workshop
Autonomous driving is just around the corner. The technology will revolutionise our road traffic and cities in the next years. However, we think that we can already use the technological possibilities available today to make work processes even more effective and efficient. That’s why we partnered up with the Berlin based startup Kopernikus Automotive to set up a pilot project for autonomous driving in the workshop. Together, we installed a test field on our premises in Ludwigsburg, aiming to enable vehicles to drive from their parking space to the lifting platform and back again — fully autonomously.
100 days of building the future of modern work in the workshop
The collaboration with Kopernikus Automotive is part of the Startup Autobahn innovation platform, that brings innovative start-ups from all over the world to Stuttgart. The young company from Berlin specialises in technology for self-driven cars and seemed to match our idea of making use of today’s technologies perfectly. Within 100 days and with a team full of experts from the fields of highly automated and assisted driving as well as aftersales technology, we worked on bringing autonomous driving into the working life of our mechanics in Ludwigsburg. The project aims that mechanics will be able to manoeuvre the sports cars to the correct position in the workshop — quickly and automatically, using only a tablet.
Last week, our team presented the project at the Startup Autobahn EXPO Day in Stuttgart’s Wagenhallen:
Virtually test-driving million kilometres
Of course we can’t simply start to implement autonomous cars into the workstream in our workshop. So before the vehicles are driven into the workshop truly autonomously, the first step is to create the test site including workshop environment as a virtual representation, which is used to train an deep learning and reinforcement learning networks. It drives more than one million virtual test kilometres and learns independently on the basis of real framework data. Then, the use case is tested under real conditions. The team will experience the use of autonomous driving in the workshop in test operation, and we want to use this state of the project to learn from the team’s feedback as it’s highly important for the success of the project.
More than just driving to the lifting platform and back
The further intention is that the AI technology used for autonomous driving will then not only handle vehicle orientation, but also independently identify and localise objects — and plan paths automatically. We’re also implementing extensive measures to guarantee safety in the practical implementation stage of the test run, including a speed limit of seven kilometres per hour and the additional use of a human driver.
It’s super exciting to be part of this pilot project because it’s the first time that we’re bringing autonomous driving with AI into our daily work, into existing processes and onto our own premises. This is a big step towards modern workshops and we are just now writing the intro of this story.
Alexander Haas is Project Manager for Automated Driving at the Porsche workshop. To find out more about Porsche and Technology, follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
