News from the LFF

At this year’s IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium, we had the opportunity to present our latest research findings to an international audience of researchers. The conference took place at the historic Renaissance Centre in Detroit.

In our conference paper entitled “Bayesian Risk-Aware Routing with Exposure Prediction and Uncertainty Propagation”, we presented a method that combines historical accident data and predicted traffic volume within a statistical risk model and uses this as a weighting factor for safety-optimised route planning. This is intended to enable intelligent vehicles to determine a route with the lowest possible modelled accident risk as early as the planning phase.

With around 300 accepted papers, the conference offered a wide range of presentations, poster sessions and keynote speeches in the field of intelligent driving systems.

The paper ‘Robust AI-Based Deer Detection for ADAS in Adverse Weather Conditions’ was presented at the Enhanced Safety of Vehicles (ESV) Conference in Toronto, Canada. The ESV Conference is one of the world’s leading conferences in the field of vehicle safety and automotive safety.

The paper investigated how AI-based wildlife detection for camera-based driver assistance systems – particularly for functions such as Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) – can be made more robust under adverse weather conditions. The focus was on critical environmental factors such as fog and rain, which can significantly reduce the performance of visual perception systems. Through systematic training strategies using synthetically generated, weather-affected image data, earlier detection distances and significantly improved detection performance were achieved. Another key contribution of this work is a methodology for the data-driven generation of realistic wildlife collision test scenarios for the validation of camera-based ADAS functions.

Our publication on the degradation behaviour of lidar-based object detection under the influence of rain was published in the Journal of Advances in Information Technology (JAIT) and can be viewed at the following link:
https://www.jait.us/show-256-1725-1.html (external link, opens in a new window)
The underlying research was funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and the state of Lower Saxony. The latter was part of the ERDF innovation network GESAL.

As part of the ICD2025 conference in Rome, the study "Methodology and Test Design of the Measurement Technique of the Penetration Depth of Microneedles for Skin Treatment" was presented, which was developed in collaboration with the company Dermaroller GmbH.

As part of the cooperation between Ostfalia and the Chinese-German University of Applied Sciences (CDHAW) at Tongji University, Christoph Rohmann travelled to Shanghai to give a lecture on battery safety in electric vehicles at the CDHAW. In addition to the teaching programme, Rohmann exchanged ideas with researchers from Tongji University on collaboration opportunities in the context of autonomous driving. The first joint publications are already being planned.

Under the umbrella of the existing university cooperation, students from the Hogeschool Rotterdam visited the institute building and took part in a guided tour of the premises and test benches; in addition, Mr Jacco van Nieuwaal completed an internship in the winter semester 2024 under the supervision of Roland Marciniak with a focus on drop tower tests on CFRP crash tubes to validate crash behaviour.

As part of the WindMate research project, a project meeting was held at Ostfalia University in Wolfsburg in October 2024. The aim of the on-site meeting was to intensively discuss the system components and interfaces of the planned high-wind warning system. In addition to presenting the results to date, the focus was also on getting to know each other personally and working directly with the project partner Ventus, which further strengthened the close cooperation.

During his research visit to Japan, Christoph Rohmann took part in a panel discussion on autonomous driving at Nagoya University in Nagoya. The research-related exchange was organised by Dr Naoki Akai, who is working on autonomous driving issues at Nagoya University. Dr Shigemichi Matsuzaki from the Research Frontier Center of the Toyota Motor Corporation took part alongside other representatives from Nagoya University. The scientific discourse revealed many interfaces that are to be expanded in joint research projects in the future.