News

Octane was part of the IAA Mobility 2021 on September 6, 2021. We showcased the latest OCTANE version together with our VERTEX test vehicle at the Fraunhofer booth.

Information about VERTEX – Test vehicles for technology experiments:

The VERTEX research vehicle on display, together with its electrically driven sister vehicle, is one of two Fraunhofer IOSB Golf VII vehicles equipped for fully automated driving. Both feature redundant 360° equipment of various environmental sensors, including camera, radar and LiDAR technology, as well as the ability to access the vehicle's own CAN bus for automated longitudinal and lateral control. The »test vehicles for technology experiments« are used in research projects for automated and connected driving, cyber-safe cooperative driving via imaging light communication, simulation, and in the field of human-machine interaction.

Several new use cases of OCTANE were presented during the digital event “Karlsruhe Mobility Summit 2021” on 16.04.2021.

Together with some explanations, the new use cases showing a bottleneck assistant, a rendezvous assistant and the generation of sensor data as well as ground truth in OCTANE can be found as application example on the OCTANE Website.

At the “Fraunhofer Solution Days 2020” on 29.10.2020, OCTANE was presented with several use cases as part of the Fraunhofer Performance Center “Profilregion Mobilitätssysteme Karlsruhe”(“Profilregion: High Performance Center for Mobility Research”).

The presentation of Dr. Ruf with the topic “Testing for Automated and Connected Driving” showed challenges that arise with automated driving based on systems from the areas of “Safety” and “Security”.

The presented examples of a novel situation-dependent emergency stop system and an imaging light communication to secure radio communication were presented to the conference attendees by simulation results from OCTANE.

OCTANE now supports physical-based camera models, so-called “physical-based rendering” and “physical-based shading”. Thereby, OCTANE allows to render the same scene either lightweight and in real time using the 3D engine OGRE 2, or accurately but computationally expensively in the Mitsuba raytracer.

This exchangeability is achieved by exclusively using physical quantities for surface and light source models in OCTANE, for example Fresnel coefficients or luminous intensities. Rendered images depend on exposure times, apertures and sensitivity to light (ISO). The simulation in the OGRE 2 3D engine, especially the bidirectional reflectance distribution functions (BRDFs), were extended to allow a consistent simulation of these parameters with established raytracing renderers such as Mitsuba and Arnold.

As part of these extensions, the sky simulation model of Bruneton and Neyret was integrated, to achieve a physical hue and intensity distribution for the sky (or the atmosphere), and simulate different times of day, from dawn over daytime until dusk.

These features were applied to simulate a method for vehicle-to-vehicle communication using visible light from the vehicles' headlights, which communicate messages using high-frequency flicker. This task required a quantitative simulation of actual car light and stray light sources, the simulation of “rolling shutter” effects in CMOS cameras, and the simulation of optical filters, as well as the processing of the simulated images in neural networks for vehicle detection.

OCTANE between traffic flow and vehicle dynamics

On November 18, 2019 at the “Industriearbeitskreis Digitalisierung” (“industry working group digitalization”) of the “Profilregion Mobilitätssysteme Karlsruhe” (“Profilregion: High Performance Center for Mobility Research”) and on the two exhibition days 21.-22.11.2019 of the “TÜV Tagung automatisiertes Fahren” (“automated driving conference”) visitors were able to interact with an emergency-stop system, which was simulated in OCTANE and controllable via buttons. OCTANE presented itself with a new, physically-based visualization and the combination of traffic flow- and multi-body physics simulation. 

On 22nd and 23rd November 2017 at the 8th conference “Fahrerassistenz” (“driver assistance”) at the TÜV-SÜD area in Munich the paper “A Non-Invasive Cyberrisk in Cooperative Driving” with simulation results of OCTANE in the context of the cyberattack was presented. Additionally, the VERTEX-vehicles with a live demonstration of the “Visible Licht Communication” as the cyberattack’s countermeasure were explained in detail to interested conference attendees.

On September 21 and 22, 2017 the KSS Research Workshop of the Karlsruhe Service Research Institute (KSRI) took place in Karlsruhe together with interesting demonstrations by the FZI and Fraunhofer IOSB. Beside a fully-automatically driven vehicle of the FZI, Fraunhofer IOSB demonstrated the countermeasure for preventing the cyberattack on cooperative vehicles of the future. The countermeasure simulated in OCTANE was shown there in reality for the first time, integrated into one of the VERTEX vehicles.

On June 1 and 2, 2017, OCTANE was at the 8th Kongress of the Forum ElektroMobilität e.V. in Berlin for the “Profilregion Mobilitätssysteme Karlsruhe”(“Profilregion: High Performance Center for Mobility Research”). The topics of the conference ranged from electromobility to automated and connected vehicles. The cyberattack scenario of cooperative driving simulated in OCTANE was shown within the virtual reality environment.

We were represented at the Hannover Messer with a first official demonstration of OCTANE.

Visitors were able to experience the hacking scenario in a virtual reality environment. From different perspectives the visitors could witness a successful cooperative maneuver, as well as at the cyberattack and its consequences leading to an accident of the two vehicles.