Towards Autonomously Driving Trains on Tracks With Open Access

摘要

Compared to automobiles on roads, trains have less degrees of freedom as they are bound torailroads. Thus, it should be more straight-forward to let them drive autonomously comparedto automobiles. Several autonomous trains and subways already exist; however they operateon closed tracks. Typical examples are airport trains, also known as people movers. Thispaper sketches the conceptual, technical and legal challenges towards autonomously drivingtrains on existing railroads that are freely accessible and thus require reliable obstaclerecognition. We try to generalize the experiences made so far in several large-scale researchprojects that aim at automating small, secondary railways. We summarize the results of aprototypical autonomous train system that we called autoBAHN.