The research initiative began in June 2015 and will run until November 2018. The project has a budget totalling 36.3 million euros and is supported by the Federal Ministry for Economy and Energy.

The two organisations are working on a back-end solution called the Safety Server that will supply Ko-HAF project cars with data such as presence and quality of lane markings or objects on the road from their own onboard sensors. The Safety Server processes this information and then provides the cars with a forward-looking digital map to enable highly automated driving.

Opel’s work focuses on the communication between server and car – e.g. designing the server-architecture, defining the interfaces and implementing the communication protocols.

Opel’s second area of focus concerns the driver’s actions. The company’s engineers are developing software and a system of sensors to detect and categorize the driver’s actions while the car is driving automatically.

In order to predict how the driver might react when he or she must retake control, the correlation between driving situations and the driver’s actions inside the car is of special interest.

An additional core-task is the development of a self-localization process for the vehicle. Opel is designing algorithms for visual mapping and localization which are then merged with information from back-end and onboard maps, movement sensors and the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS).

Opel will build a prototype that can display the essential functions of cooperative highly automated driving on the Autobahn, i.e. automatically entering the Autobahn and merging with the traffic, driving on the Autobahn including over-taking manoeuvres, and finally exiting the Autobahn automatically.

Initially Opel will test and validate the prototype hardware and the highly automated driving functionality on a proving ground. Testing will continue on public roads as soon as the prototype technology has reached a sufficiently advanced stage.