Junior 3: A test platform for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems

Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) are becoming more common in today's vehicles with more complex functions being implemented in production vehicles. On the research side, significant technology development in hardware and software has been spurred in recent years by the DARPA Grand Challenge and Urban Challenge in 2005 and 2007 respectively. This paper describes ‘Junior 3’, a vehicle built at Volkswagen Group of America's Electronics Research Lab, based on the knowledge gained from the DARPA Challenges and applied to ADAS functionalities. Specifically we focussed on object detection and vehicle positioning capabilities with close to production grade sensors and describe an ‘Autonomous Valet Parking’ and ‘Object Tracking’ application with this system.