Railway
Group Leader: Dr. rer. nat. Martin Lauer
Railways are a transportation system of the future, especially in times of climate change. With our research at the Institute of Measurement and Control Systems at KIT we support the development of new technologies for autonomous trains and modern train protection systems.
Future trains should independently monitor their environment and detect potential obstacles or dangerous situations. An additional step towards a future railway system is to enable railway vehicles to estimate their position onboard autonomously. This allows to reduce costly infrastructure at the track. In our research we focus on these key technologies.
Railway Localization
With level 3 of the European Train Control System (ETCS) position estimation is performed by the onboard equipment of the railway vehicle. This allows the removal of costly infrastructure at trackside. Our goal is to develop and investigate new technologies that enable board-autonomous localization while minimizing the requirements for trackside infrastructure. Reliability, for example through the combination of independent systems, plays a particularly important role in our research.
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Perception and Scene Understanding
Environmental perception and scene understanding are an essential component for developing driver assistance systems and automating railway traffic. Our aim is to design novel perception algorithms that can solve tasks like object tracking, rail track detection and ego-motion estimation. For this purpose, we are creating a novel benchmark suite that simplifies and standardizes the development process of perception models.
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