DENSE: Environment Perception in Bad Weather—First Results

This paper presents the first results of the publicly funded ECSEL project DENSE (Adverse weather environmental sensing system). DENSE seeks to eliminate one of the most pressing problems of automated driving: the inability of current systems to sense their surroundings under all weather conditions. The task in DENSE is to develop a sensor suite for automatic driving, by means of which the vehicle environment can be reliably detected 24/7 under these bad weather conditions. In this paper, the state of the art of environmental sensor technology is first examined and evaluated in the CEREMA weather chamber. Then, the architecture of the DENSE Sensor Suite is presented and the development results of the most important system components are described. The results show that the realization of a 24/7 all-weather sensor suite is absolutely feasible with these components .