The 3rd meeting of the Open AutoDrive Forum (OADF) took place on April 12, 2016, at TomTom in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The forum is a platform for stakeholders that are active in the area of digital maps and autonomous driving. It currently includes the consortia ADASIS, NDS, SENSORIS and TISA. The forum’s third meeting since December 2015 attracted even more participants than the previous ones. In total about 50 companies were represented by more than 70 attendees. The increasing participation from major car manufacturers, system providers as well as map and service providers underlines the importance of the forum as a platform for advancing the topic of autonomous driving in a collaborative way.
The welcome speech was given by Harald Goddijn (CEO of TomTom). It was followed by an inspiring keynote speech by a major player in the field. Yang Yan (Baidu) illustrated their approaches for creating maps for autonomous driving and their use in autonomous cars.
After the keynote speech, the results from the task forces initiated during the last forum meeting were presented:
- the representation of dynamic map data in the ADASIS format,
- the role of TPEG and the NDS format for delivering dynamic content in the live map delivery chain,
- recommendations for data protection and security in the transmission chain,
- the enrichment of maps by attributes describing the quality of data in context with autonomous driving algorithms.
The results of the task forces were then discussed in breakout sessions with relevant experts. The experts agreed on follow-up activities for the corresponding task forces. This includes, e.g., a task force for elaborating challenging use cases based on the autonomous driving ecosystem architecture as it was developed and agreed in the previous meetings. Next, a gap-and-overlap analysis for TPEG and NDS volatile data in the live map delivery chain for highly dynamic data will be subject of further investigations across the consortia. The third thread of follow-up activities is on safety. One issue considered there is the fact that for autonomous driving, algorithms in the cloud backend have to be integrated with algorithms in the vehicle. In order to assure functional safety in such a complex distributed system, a task force will investigate approaches for assessing their safety. The results from all follow-up activities will be presented on the next Open AutoDrive Forum meeting.
The OADF participants also took some time to discuss how to best organise future activities and the OADF structure. The following meetings are scheduled for June 29 in California (venue to be announced) and for October in Beijing, China. The OADF will stay a sponsored organisation without membership fees. It is also planned disseminate results and activities via a dedicated website at www.openautodrive.org. This third meeting of the OADF truly established the forum as THE CROSS DOMAIN PLATFORM for all matters relating to digital maps and autonomous driving.