ANTON

ANTON was an exploratory project in the frame of the research project SAFIR funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) from August of 2020 until October of 2022.

The main objective of ANTON was to develop an experimental platform for research and testing of connected and automated driving functions. The platform builds on a serial production vehicle, Renault Twizy, extended with longitudinal and lateral drive-by-wire features, open software interface, car to X communication features and flexible sensor mounts. At the end of the project, the platform received a nationwide approval for road operation, which means that the developed driving functions can be tested both in simulation and in real road traffic.

The drive-by-wire system allows full access to the vehicle steer, brake, and accelerator through CAN bus. Therefore, the vehicle can be fully controlled even by using a joystick or a computer signals.

The open software interface, in this case, an open-source autonomous driving stack, provides predefined modules for perception, decision, and planning. Additionally, it allows users to modify the source code to implement e.g. new sensors or algorithms.  After all, the outputs of autonomous driving stack are transferred by CAN bus to the drive-by-wire low-level controller. The low-level controller takes care about the commands to the actuators.

The flexible sensor mounts allow the user to attach different types of sensors such as cameras, radars, and lidars. Thereby, for a certain use case, the application of different types and quantities of sensors is possible.