CUbE: A Research Platform for Shared Mobility and Autonomous Driving in Urban Environments

The number of people living in urban environments is continuing to grow, which leads to rising demand for intelligent transportation solutions. By flexibly supplementing public transport, driverless shuttles are widely regarded as a big building block for seamless mobility in the future, e.g. as first and last mile delivery systems. Therefore, we would like to introduce the Continental Urban Mobility Experience (CUbE), our research platform for driverless shuttles in urban environments. In contrast to the evolutionary automation of traditional cars, the CUbE helps to investigate new challenges and opportunities for fully autonomous driving in cities with a different kind of vehicle. Herein, we describe its system setup, early algorithmic approaches and share some of our real-world experiences, which we gained by extensive driving in an urban-like scenario.