karl. - A Research Vehicle for Automated and Connected Driving

TL;DR

Karl. addresses the need for accessible, real-world research platforms to advance L4 automated and connected driving. It presents a holistic vehicle platform built on a VW T7 Multivan, featuring modular racks, a 360° sensor suite, centralized high-performance compute, and a ROS 2–based ADS stack, integrated with 5G and V2X communications. The work provides detailed design decisions, hardware configurations, synchronization strategies, and preliminary evaluations of clock accuracy, latency, power, and safety systems, illustrating the platform's readiness for extended research and data collection. The practical impact lies in enabling independent institutions to perform real-world development, validation, and demonstrations while sharing datasets and insights to bridge the gap between simulation and deployment.

Abstract

As highly automated driving is transitioning from single-vehicle closed-access testing to commercial deployments of public ride-hailing in selected areas (e.g., Waymo), automated driving and connected cooperative intelligent transport systems (C-ITS) remain active fields of research. Even though simulation is omnipresent in the development and validation life cycle of automated and connected driving technology, the complex nature of public road traffic and software that masters it still requires real-world integration and testing with actual vehicles. Dedicated vehicles for research and development allow testing and validation of software and hardware components under real-world conditions early on. They also enable collecting and publishing real-world datasets that let others conduct research without vehicle access, and support early demonstration of futuristic use cases. In this paper, we present karl., our new research vehicle for automated and connected driving. Apart from major corporations, few institutions worldwide have access to their own L4-capable research vehicles, restricting their ability to carry out independent research. This paper aims to help bridge that gap by sharing the reasoning, design choices, and technical details that went into making karl. a flexible and powerful platform for research, engineering, and validation in the context of automated and connected driving. More impressions of karl. are available at https://karl.ac.

Figures (8)

• Figure 1: Cabin rack carrying drawer, V2X unit, 5G router, AE switch, HPC, core switch, vehicle interface, power distribution panel, and power supply
• Figure 2: Sensor rack carrying stereo cameras, rotating lidars, FMCW lidar, rooftop box, 5G antenna, and GNSS antennas
• Figure 3: Developer workplace and front row HMI devices
• Figure 4: Fields of view of environment sensors: stereo cameras, rotating lidars, FMCW lidar, and 4D radars. The top-down view shows all sensors, the other views only show those sensors whose vertical field of view lies in the view plane.
• Figure 5: Overview of the two-tier Ethernet architecture connecting rooftop sensors and compute to the in-cabin core network