82 Insight | UGVs cut back fuel and power usage (largely thanks to precisely- and AI-optimised control and navigation), fleet operators are now looking to invest – or at least gain experience – in self-driving solutions to make good of some of their (traditionally) less profitable operations. One of these is Rheinbahn AG, a public transport operator in western Germany, which has commissioned ZF Mobility Solutions to test the short-term use of an autonomous mobility solution with a safety driver on public roads in Düsseldorf. As Jonathan Scheu, technical project lead autonomous shuttle program at ZF Mobility Solutions, tells us, “We have already tested this type of vehicle with AD technology from ZF as part of the RABus project in the southwestern German cities of Mannheim and Friedrichshafen. That connected villages with cities, through gradually optimising a cost-effective, autonomous means of driving the rural and remote roads that fleet operators traditionally don’t always cover.” The vehicle is a 9.2 t shuttle measuring 7 m long, with nine seats and one wheelchair space. As of writing, the trials are only performed with seated passengers, though pending optimisations and safety assurances, additional standing passengers will be permitted. To fully assure safe operations on public roads, where mixed traffic remains a risk despite the remote nature of the routes to be covered, the shuttle integrates a plethora of Lidars, cameras and radars such that all three technologies fully overlap in covering 360° around the vehicle. “We have both long- and shortrange Lidars, and our configuration and development road map are set-up so that we can gradually connect more sensors to our [AD] stack,” Scheu explains. “That means we actually carry more sensors than we currently need, but as we expand our trial routes, and take on more complex traffic and manoeuvring in the future, we’ll need those sensors which currently sit inactive around the body. And the good thing about that is that we won’t have to do architectural changes every three-to-five months as we advance up our development roadmap: everything we physically need is already on the shuttle, making our development engineering very efficient.” Gaining approvals for trial operations also took exhaustive hardware and software engineering across a plethora of safety systems, the latter integrating multiple subroutines for constant internal selfsupervision and inroads for safety driver intervention. The former encompasses a wide range of ZF’s safety-critical automotive parts, among them one of its FRGen imaging radars at the front, to sensor fusion using a ProAI automotive supercomputer, and a ProConnect modem enabling real-time interfacing with fleet management systems, remote supervision UIs, and telemetry analysis servers. Uniquely (among those solutions we have covered), the shuttle also integrates eight microphones throughout, to audiodetect police, ambulance or firefighters’ sirens approaching. As well as enabling the shuttle to autonomously make way much earlier than cameras, due to the greater distances over which audio detection will work than visual detection, camera views can easily be blocked by surrounding traffic or structures. Through this approach, the project stands to make one autonomous road vehicle significantly less of a nuisance than some others picked up in mainstream news. Defence Use of UGVs for defence applications has become increasingly widespread, as inherently crucial tactical and strategic assets, and for saving the need to send humans to front line areas. Specific use-cases for military UGVs vary from frontline logistics, casualty evacuations (CASEVAC), and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) missions. To serve in all of these types of operations and more, Munich-based ARX Robotics has engineered its flagship Gereon RCS UGV with modularity as a forefront design goal, such that different payloads can be swapped on and off the vehicle. Such payloads include Saab surveillance radars, Thales ground radars, Hensoldt optronics, UAV launchers from Rheinmetall and UAV launch-and-recovery solutions from Quantum Systems. “As standard, we have 360° of cameras around the robot for environmental perception, with a thermal camera for night vision and a stereo camera for depth sensing at the front, as well as a front-mounted and -oriented Lidar also,” says Carsten Ramke, senior robotics software engineer at ARX Robotics. “Wherever possible, we’ve aimed for a lower-cost approach in subsystem selection compared with other UGV manufacturers. We’ve made it a April/May 2025 | Uncrewed Systems Technology This autonomous shuttle is being developed by ZF for use in key routes by Rheinbahn connecting villages and cities (Image courtesy of Rheinbahn)
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