Man Truck & Bus has completed a test phase on the highway with a truck that is equipped with technologies for autonomous driving at level 4. The test took place in Germany and was financed in the context of a research project with the name Atlas-L4.
In addition to MAN Truck & Bus, this project brought together a budget of 59.1 million euros The expertise of Knorr-Bremse, Leoni, Bosch, Fernride, BTC Embedded Systems, Fraunhofer Aisec, the Technical Universities of Munich and Braunschweig, Türzitue, Autobahnes. The aim was to have an autonomous level 4 truck on the highway in the context of Hub-to-Hub transport. This is possible in Germany since the approval of a federal law in 2021.
To achieve this result, the partners of the consortium have installed an on-board network and redundant braking and steering systems. At the same time, a technical supervision center has been put into use to, among other things, test the roads in accordance with legislation and to draw up risk analyzes (also in the field of cyber protection).
Frederik Zohm, member of the board of directors for research and development at Man Truck & Bus, speaks of an industrialisable concept: “We can use the work of Atlas-L4 as a basic concept for future industrial developments, although several detailed questions still have to be clarified before we can produce an autonomous truck in series.
