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Self-driving car ISEAUTO for research and education

Conference Paper · June 2018

DOI: 10.1109/REM.2018.8421793

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Self-driving car ISEAUTO for research and education
Raivo Sell
Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
Tallinn University of Technology
Tallinn, Estonia
raivo.sell@ttu.ee
Mairo Leier
Department of Computer Systems
Tallinn University of Technology
Tallinn, Estonia
Abstract—The paper introduces a research and educational
project targeted to self-driving cars and urban mobility issues. The
project focuses on design and development of the self-driving car
in cooperation with a partner company, university researchers,
and students. Research and implementation results of simulations,
software development and mechanical design are presented, and a
potential smart city use case discussed.
Keywords—artificial intelligence; autonomous vehicle; self-
driving car; simulation; urban mobility
INTRODUCTION
Due to the rapid development of various sensors including
radars, lidars, camera systems and also wireless
communications, driver assistance systems autonomous
vehicles have made significant advances in recent years. The
main requirements that are imposed to autonomous vehicles are
ability to cover long distances in a safer way, while decreasing
the rate of accidents and traffic jams, and obeying the traffic
rules, all without human interaction. There are 10 trillion
automobile miles driven each year worldwide, with complex and
novel conditions generating millions of situations in which
autonomous vehicles could fail [1]. The highly intelligent
systems of an autonomous vehicle should take into account a
broader range of information about the current road situation and
the car itself on the same way as a human driver. In order to
enable autonomous vehicles to handle adverse driving
conditions, such as rain and wet roads, the control algorithm
must be able to recognize roads within a tolerable margin of
error, using measuring instruments, such as cameras and laser
sensors. Autonomous vehicles must quickly make decisions
based on incomplete information in situations that programmers
often will not have considered, using ethics that must be encoded
all too literally in software [2].
A very big step for autonomous vehicles was taken in
Germany in 2017 [1], when German lawmakers set the legal
framework for allowing self-driving vehicles on public roads, as
long as a human driver is at the controls, to take over in critical
situations. Similar laws are applied in US (California and
Nevada) [3] and many other countries. Estonia has allowed the
The project is supported by Tallinn University of Technology and
Silberauto joint grant SS419.
978-1-5386-5413-2/18/$31.00 ©2018 European Union
Anton Rassõlkin
Department of Electrical Power Engineering and
Mechatronics
Tallinn University of Technology
Tallinn, Estonia
Juhan-Peep Ernits
Department of Software Science
Tallinn University of Technology
Tallinn, Estonia
testing of self-driving cars on public roads already last year by
allowing autonomous vehicles into the traffic for limited testing
period after completing a simple permit application procedure
[4]. Traffic can be as unpredictable as the weather, and being
able to respond to both means navigating countless scenarios, to
fully test, all those scenarios by simply driving around would
take not years but centuries. Therefore, such things as computer
simulations and mathematical modeling should also be taken
into account [5].
The current paper describes an ISEAUTO project, the first
self-driving car project in Estonia that is implemented at Tallinn
University of Technology (TTÜ) in cooperation with an
Estonian automotive company Silberauto Estonia. ISEAUTO is
a research and educational project targeted on the design and
development of a self-driving vehicle in cooperation with a
private company university researchers and students.
I. SIMILAR PROJECTS
The computerization of driving can be traced back at least to
the 1970s, with the introduction of electronic anti-lock brakes.
Today more advanced features like automated steering,
acceleration and emergency braking are emerging every year.
[2]. There are a number of industrial companies worldwide
working on self-driving car projects, such as Volkswagen,
BMW, Hyundai Motors, Audi, Ford, General Motors, Honda,
Mercedes, Nissan, Nvidia, Tesla, Toyota, etc. It is interesting to
note that Silicon Valley companies, including Google, Apple,
and Uber, are seeking to become key players in this market even
though their history is not directly tied to the production of cars
[6].
Several Asian countries are making significant contributions
to the field: in Japan, automakers are working together to make
self-driving cars a reality in time for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics
[1]. Tata and Mahindra in India, which is one of the larger
markets, are making progress in developing market-viable
automated driving technologies that are relevant to local
conditions, with initial deployments and expansion in farming
and mining applications. In Europe, several significant
autonomous vehicle research efforts, such as Eureka
PROMETHEUS Project (1987–1995) [1], have been underway
since the 1980s which laid the foundations of autonomous
vehicle technology. In the US, according to SAE (Society of
Automotive Engineers) levels of autonomy, Level 2 systems
(that is, partial automation in which humans are still responsible)
are available from a number of automotive manufacturers as
Tesla Autopilot, Volvo Pilot Assist, Mercedes-Benz Drive Pilot,
Cadillac Super Cruise.
Not only industry benefits on autonomous vehicle projects,
but there is also a number of projects done by scholars.
Technological advances in the areas of distributed dynamic
controls, computer vision, and machine learning including deep
learning for object recognition, intelligent robotic systems,
simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), have clearly
moved the research and development of these technologies
closer to the market in a big way.
The rapid development of higher-quality sensing in the
optical, radar and LiDAR (laser-based ranging) domains has
helped funnel data to a variety of deep-learning systems to
recognize objects with improved detection accuracy and fewer
false-positives [1], [2]. 3D imaging systems allow the
autonomous vehicles to observe their surroundings and always
stop for other road users. LiDAR is a key sensor for the
autonomous vehicles because it enables highly precise and
robust localization across a wide range of conditions. LiDAR is
complex and expensive right now, but within the next few years,
the price is likely to decrease and reliability increase [7]. Some
companies are developing LiDAR systems that can function in
much smaller, more easily produced packages, even on a chip
(for example, Strobe, Valeo, and Velodyne) [1].
Table I presents an overview of similar to ISEAUTO
autonomous vehicle projects and gives information about design
strategy used in ongoing projects [8]-[13]. Similar to ISEAUTO
project majority of overviewed autonomous vehicle projects are
a cooperation of research universities and industrial companies.
The main goal of overview is to determine the number and types
of sensors used in Last Mile autonomous vehicle projects. The
decision was to limit the speed of ISEAUTO vehicle up to 10-
20 km/h, place LiDARs in the upper corners of the vehicle, place
cameras in pairs to the front and rear and the sides, place
ultrasonic sensors around the vehicle. Application of a Robot
Operating System (ROS) based software stack looks reasonable
for the first prototyping of the autonomous control system.
II. PROJECT SCOPE
A. Background and aims
The ISEAUTO [14] project is a cooperation project between
industry and university which has a range of objectives from
both sides [15] as well as a very practical outcome. The project
started in June 2017, where TTÜ and Silberauto Estonia agreed
to jointly develop a self-driving car which will have its public
demonstration in September 2018. The purpose from the
company side was to get involved with self-driving technology
as the future of the automotive industry and also get experience
in manufacturing a special purpose car body as it is one of the
branches of the company. However, the company also values the
engineering education and wants to support young talented
students to study engineering as well as engage new students to
start their engineering studies. This idea and objective fully
matched university interest, so the agreement was easy to
accomplish.
In addition, the university wants to grow its competencies in
this field and enable interesting yet practical projects for
engineering students for which this cooperation project offers
good opportunities.

TABLE I. AN OVERVIEW OF A SELECTION OF SIMILAR PROJECTS

Sensors
Number of passengers
Max speed, k m/h

Accelerometer

References
Range, km

Ultrasonic
Odometer

Cameras
RADAR
LiDAR
GPS

Nr Name Developer Software

1 EZ10 EasyMile 45 15 80 OK OK OK 6 9 Self Developed [8]

2 Parkshuttle 2GetThere 40 12+10 100 OK OK OK 1 4 Self Developed [9]

3 Olli Local Motors 40 12 60 OK OK OK OK 2 IBM Watson AI [10]

4 WEpod TU Delft 25 6 100 OK OK OK 6 9 9 Robot Operating System [11]

5 Navya Navya 45 15 OK OK 4 4 Self Developed [12]

6 Novus drive Hi-Tech Robotic Systemz 40 150 OK OK OK 5 1 Self Developed [13]

Fig. 1 Body design (left) and prototype implementation (right)
The project has the following terms and objectives:
• Company and university contribute on the equal basis
and will share the outcoming results;
• The developed vehicle is going to drive in the university
campus following a pre-defined route;
• The vehicle is fully autonomous and can operate on
public roads under normal weather conditions;
• The team consists of company employees, researchers
and students;
• Public demo of the vehicle will be made year after the
project launch at the 100 year anniversary of the
university (September 2018).
B. Practical study for students
The project is an opportunity for students while studying at
TTÜ – modern education is provided, and students can engage
in practical studies in an area of cutting-edge technology. This is
especially important as the university has recently restructured
its curricula in BSc level and ongoing restructuring is in progress
on the MSc level. One of the aims of the restructuring is to make
studies more practical and better reflect the industry needs. This
practical cooperation project is exactly matching university aims
and provides practical and high-level development experience
for engineering students. Another benefit of this project is that
the team has a truly integrated membership. At first industry
employees, researchers and students are working for hand-to-
hand with one project which itself is interdisciplinary. In the
project team, there are students involved from the departments
of Computer Systems, Software Science, Electrical Power
Engineering and Mechatronics, Mechanical and Industrial
Engineering, etc.
C. Competence development
Carrying out a hands-on project helps to structure the know-
how about autonomous vehicles and self-driving algorithms at
the university while providing valuable practical experience for
future engineers in Estonia. Also, the collected datasets provide
a valuable asset for the evaluation of various sensors in local
environmental settings. Having competences in autonomy in the
city environment will allow us to investigate smart city solutions
involving autonomous cars in the future.
III. TECHNICAL SOLUTION
A. Body construction and technical parameters
The body is designed and developed by the project industrial
partner Silberauto Estonia. All molds and panel frames are
specifically designed for the project. The body design is
symmetrical, meaning that the vehicle can drive in both
directions without having specific front and back side. Sidebar
lights are implemented by using RGB LED matrix where all
individual LEDs are independently driven. It means that the
vehicle can easily change lights from red to white on both ends.
The direction indicators and other visual elements can easily be
provided on the same panels.
The vehicle has the following technical parameters:
• Cargo or passenger 4+2 places;
• Cruising speed 10-20 km/h;
• Turning radius 9 m;
• Main motor 50 kW;
• Battery 16 kWh.
Dimensions:
• Height 2.3 m;
• Length 3,5 m;
• Width 1,3 m.
Sensors:
• LiDAR Velodyne VLP-16 x 2;
• Ultrasonic sensors front and back x 8;
• Ultrasonic sensors door side x 6;
• Short distance radar;
 • Cameras x 8;
• RTK-GNSS;
• IMU.
Software:
• ROS;
• Autoware;
• Custom integration and system test solution.
One of the intentions of the project is to keep the
development open and make the project accessible to new
developers and students. An open source software platform is
critical in that respect: the main middleware is ROS, and
software component integration is based on the Autoware stack
[16]. Autoware is an open-source software for urban
autonomous driving, maintained by Tier IV [17]. It integrates
Fig. 2. The architecture of the vehicle control system
The autonomy is achieved running Autoware in a PC on top
of ROS that communicates with the controllers over dedicated
Ethernet to minimize delays. Mission critical controllers are
divided into three layers - master controller, slave controllers,
and real actuators and sensors. The main task of the master
controller is to forward information from and to the PC with the
minimum delay. It handles communication with ROS, listens to
data from the electric vehicle (EV) CAN network and
communicates with the slave controllers with CAN1 and CAN3
networks. CAN1 network is dedicated to the mission-critical
drive controller that manages gearbox, brakes, hand brakes,
steering wheel and gas pedal. CAN3 network is dedicated to
other controllers that control other actuators, interior actuators
components for 3D localization, 3D mapping, path planning,
path following, vehicle control (acceleration, brake, steering),
data logging, etc. Since Tier IV approach is to use an external
3D map provider, it was necessary to develop a custom vector
map development solution based on GIS software that enables
us to align 3D point clouds with reference maps and build vector
maps for the areas where our vehicle operates. As self-driving
cars can pose a danger to human life, special attention is targeted
to the system and integration testing of the software.
B. Control architecture
The architecture of the car control is divided into two main
blocks as shown in Figure 2. The upper part is the autonomous
functionality that decides based on the sensor readings the speed
and direction of the car. Lower part depicts mission-critical
functionality that takes care of the car control by controlling
different actuators and reading feedback from the car CAN
network.
and low-level sensors, e.g., the ultrasonic sensors around the car.
The number of slave controllers may vary depending on the
progress of the development. The software of all controllers is
based on the real-time operating system FreeRTOS kernel [18].
The most sophisticated low-level functionality is integrated
into the Drive controller. There are also PID controllers
implemented for acceleration and steering control. Coefficients
for PID controllers were chosen with the MATLAB
environment simulations. Other slave controllers have very
similar build up on the hardware and software level as Drive
controller.
 Figure 3 describes messages that are sent between system
elements. Master controller acts as a central gateway between all
nodes. All data messages between controllers and ROS are
divided into different priority groups. That ensures that the most
critical car driving messages are always handled with the highest
priority and with the smallest delay. Most of the delays are
caused by the EV CAN network speed. For example, some
critical messages from EV are sent with the frequency of 50 Hz.
ROS is configured to send driving messages with the frequency
Fig. 3. Vehicle messages flow diagram
IV. SAFETY
Safety of the developed system is of critical importance. We
approach safety from the risk analysis and management point of
view: while developing the system we carry out a bow tie
method based risk analysis where we identify key hazards, their
causes and consequences and provide barriers to prevent the
causes from leading to the hazards and consequences leading to
harm to human beings or property. While the risk analysis is
ongoing, we have implemented the following measures:
• Clear software process including code reviews and code
signing;
of 100 Hz. Most of the controller software functionality is
covered with C unit tests to ensure the quality and functionality
of the software.
Controller hardware is chosen based on the STM32 ARM
that has wide range of different type of controllers, user-friendly
configuration interface and previous good experience.
STMicroelectronics also provides special automotive controllers
for future developments.
• Extensive testing of the software both at the controller
level and PC level (There is a separate team from a
partner company working on testing the drive controller,
and we are developing novel test harnesses for running
system level tests on ROS level);
• Placement and selection of additional sensors to ensure
that all of the areas on the path of the car is covered (e.g.,
we are experimenting with two LiDARs in the front of
the car. There is an additional 2D LiDAR planned to be
added to the bumper of the car);
• Checklist based culture of running and setting up the
equipment (This helps to minimize human error in
repetitive tasks);
 • Several safety features are designed at very low level to
make sure the car stops if an anomaly is detected;
• The speed of the car is limited, and initially, the vehicle
will operate in dedicated space (There is also a human
operator with a safety break on standby).
In the future, we also plan to extend the testing approach with
formal analysis and verification of the key components of the
car. We are also paying close attention to making sure that the
control software is protected from external intruders.
V. LEARNING EXPERIENCE
Building a self-driving car is an undertaking that requires
multidisciplinary collaboration from mechanical and electrical
engineering, mechatronics, electronics, computer systems and
software engineers. Thus participating in such a project helps to
develop various important skills such as cross-discipline
communication, working on large projects, and understanding
large and complex legacy systems.
There are currently 15 students involved in various aspects
of software development, 11 students in the electronics and low-
level microcontroller software development.
We are integrating the project work into the studies of
students in two main ways: final theses and project courses. For
example, in the software development sub team, we awarded 72
ECTS in the first half year for project courses and students plan
to achieve 60 ECTS for project courses and 98 ECTS for thesis
in the second semester. Such arrangement enables students to
work on the project for more than one semester as the software
is complex and building up understanding of the principles
requires time. This far we have observed that the clear objective
and exciting equipment available in the project has maintained
student motivation for two semesters.
The project courses are set up as 10-12 ECTS courses where
student teams of four to six are supposed to complete a realistic
task within a semester. The first project course was a 10 ECTS
start-up project course, where student teams are expected to
come up with an idea and implement a minimal viable product.
One of the teams chose the self-driving car project with a goal
to make the self-driving car drive autonomously in the Gazebo
simulator closely integrated with ROS. In that process, the
students discovered that the vector maps are essential to enable
autonomous driving and that the vector map creation tools are
not available in Autoware. As a result, they developed a
prototype vector map creation tool, based on a widely used GIS
software ArcGIS. In the second project, the students were
supposed to carry out a predefined software development task.
The task was to make Autoware drive the car based platform
autonomously. At the time of writing, the students are on track
of achieving it by the end of the semester. The achievement is
supported by 4 MSc students pursuing their MSc theses related
to various aspects of the software of the self-driving car.
View publication stats
VI. FUTURE WORK
The future works involve at first place to finalize the
prototype, and public demo is scheduled for the September
2018. By the demonstration of the prototype, the platform will
be the research and development platform for the scientists and
service development platform for industry on the other hand.
Is also remain as a multi-purpose educational platform for
students in all levels of education where dedicated courses,
students' final works or other project-based educational
activities can rely on.
The wider goal of the project is to set up a smart city space
along with a self-driving vehicle and a smart infrastructure.
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