Looking back at the 19th Open AutoDrive Forum Event

On May 9, 2023, industry experts and interested parties met at the 19^th Open AutoDrive Forum Event in Chicago and online to discuss the latest advancements in standardization for automated and autonomous driving. Jeff Raimo, Sr Director Product at HERE, welcomed everyone to Chicago and introduced UniMap, HERE’s mapping technology that creates fresher and more accurate maps. Andras Csepinszky of NNG, spokesperson for OADF and co-chair of SENSORIS, introduced OADF for those attending for the first time and moderated the sessions together with Stephanie Chaufton from TISA.

By popular demand, NDS technical coordinator Fabian Klebert explained the role of serialization in the various standards and why the NDS chose zserio rather than Protobuf, which is used in many other standards. In his presentation, he compared the two approaches in detail in terms of features, code quality, data size, and encoding/decoding speed. In summary, NDS chose zserio over Protobuf because it is smaller, faster, allows for more advanced schemas, and supports the development of ASIL-compliant solutions.

Takeshi Doihara, ISO/TC204/WG3 expert and ISO/TC211/JWG11 Co-Convenor for the Geographic Data Files (GDF) standard, explained the scope of ISO/TC204 (Intelligent Transportation Systems) and TC211 (Geographic Information/Geomatics) and the importance of these standards for GDF development. Another focus of his presentation was the difference between GDF5.1-1 (GDF 5.0) and GDF 5.1-2 and the feature representation in GDF5.1. Furthermore, he reported on the harmonization between GDF and ISO 191xx and the planned revisions of GDF.

As in all OADF events, the OADF member organizations and ASAM reported on their recent activities:

• Jean-Charles Pandazis, ADASIS Coordinator and from ERTICO, reported that ADASIS v3 – 3.0.0. has just been released internally. It includes new profiles for speed limits and a request-and-response mechanism. ADASIS is also preparing a White Paper to be released in the coming months.
• Benjamin Engel, CTO at ASAM, gave an overview of the OpenX standards, with particular focus on the Offroad Concept Project, the ASAM Text Specification, and the ASAM OpenODD.
• Martin Schleicher, NDS Chair and Elektrobit representative to NDS, gave an overview of recent advances in NDS.Live, which is now available for evaluation purposes also for non-NDS members and explained how NDS.Live can now be used to distribute map data in various scenarios.
• Andras Csepinszky, Co-Chair of SENSORIS and Advanced Automotive Technology Director of NNG, reported on the latest SENSORIS version 1.6 and the planning for SENSORIS 2.0.
• Satoru Nakajo, SIP-adus founding member from the University of Tokyo, reported on the results of the SIP-adus program in Japan, which ended in March 2023, and on planned follow-up activities.
• Matthias Unbehaun, TISA Executive Director, provided information on TPEG2 and the requirements and ongoing discussions of the follow-up version related to automated driving.
• Christian Kleine, TN-ITS President and from HERE, introduced TN-ITS and reported on progress towards alignment with DATEX II and TN-ITS.

At the end of the event, Steffen Kuhn from Elektrobit organized a workshop on reliable maps for automated driving for the on-site participants. His teaser presentation on this topic sparked a lively discussion about Reliable Map Attributes (RMAs) and RMA deviation types. As a result of the discussion, the OADF will work out more detailed and more concrete recommendations for making maps highly reliable and align with other ISO working groups on the definition of map data quality attributes.

OADF looks forward to celebrating its 20th meeting with the next event. The date and venue will be announced soon on the OADF website.