Bosch has joined forces with a number of other suppliers, automakers, and public-sector partners to launch the "cooperative highly automated driving" (Ko-HAF) research initiative, which aims to push forward the development of automated driving. The publicly funded project will tackle the challenges of highly-automated driving, in which drivers no longer need to be constantly vigilant.

But for this to happen, technical precautions are necessary. "Highly automated vehicles rely on information about their surroundings - information which supplements the data collected by their own sensors," says Dr. Dieter Rödder, head of the future mobility systems unit at Bosch's corporate research and advance engineering.

Within the framework of the Ko-HAF project, Bosch has assumed primary responsibility for developing a backend solution for collecting and making available such information about a vehicle's current surroundings, including the traffic infrastructure.

On-board sensors collect traffic information: The backend solution is based on vehicles communicating wirelessly with a central server. For the duration of the project, a variety of vehicles belonging to the different project partners will collect the data generated by their on-board sensors during test drives and feed the server with information about their surroundings.

Along with information on objects in the road, this also includes data on the existence and quality of lane markings. The collected information will be analyzed and consolidated on the server. An expanded digital map will then be made available for the vehicles to download. This will enable them to be informed in plenty of time about traffic hazards behind a bend or just over the crest of a hill.

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