Frankfurt am Main, January 16, 2025 – 35 months into the Campus FreeCity mobility project, the consortium, consisting of eight project partners from industry and science and three associated partners, provides comprehensive insights into the introduction and establishment of autonomous, modular vehicles in the city.
About the project
In the Campus FreeCity project, laboratory scale research into a complete ecosystem for mobility, transport and service tasks in the smart city has been in progress since November 2021, with a view to exploiting the full potential of new fields of technology such as artificial intelligence, autonomous driving or the Internet of Things for the traffic of the future. The project, which is funded by the Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure, centers on the modular CityBot vehicles being developed by project initiator, the EDAG Group.
As well as being suitable for transporting both people and goods, the automated robot vehicles can also be used to perform certain other urban services. The following tasks were tested in the real-world laboratory at the Deutsche Bank Park: transporting people with restricted mobility, supplying kiosks with goods, refuse and green waste disposal, watering public parks, and transporting workers and their work materials to their job locations.
It was in 2019 that the EDAG Group first presented the concept of highly automated robot vehicles to the public. During the Campus FreeCity project, the company was responsible for the extensive development and fully integrated system design, and succeeded in achieving technology readiness level four (TRL 4) for the vehicles.
The modular vehicle concept is realized by means of a mechatronic coupling system between the traction and utility modules. To communicate, the robot vehicles use 5G mobile communications technology and the internet with an operation center and the external mobility backend developed by the EDAG Group. A specially developed booking system enables users to order the various CityBot transport and work services by cell phone or tablet with special applications.
The most important findings from the innovation project
The results gained from the innovative project Campus FreeCity include important insights relating to the development of autonomous vehicle concepts, the protection of autonomous and networked vehicles, the development of safety and approval criteria and the question of how technology is accepted by passengers, pedestrians and other road users.
For the most part, the results were achieved in the course of an intensive test phase lasting several months, during which specific tasks (use cases) from stadium operations were tested. In cooperation with its partners, EintrachtTech GmbH, the digital subsidiary of Eintracht Frankfurt, defined ten use cases from the fields of transporting people with limited mobility, logistics, watering public parks and refuse disposal, and these formed the basis for the practical testing of the CityBots in the real-world laboratory at the Deutsche Bank Park. To gain a better understanding of practical requirements, potential user groups from stadium operations were actively involved in the test drives.
Dr. Oliver Bäcker, Manager of EintrachtTech's digital center, “Arena of IoT”: “In cooperation with our partners, we are designing innovations to create added value for people in the city and region, both inside and outside of the stadium. The Deutsche Bank Park is the ideal testing ground for this. As many of the processes and needs arising in city centers can also be found in the stadium grounds, insights from the 'smart stadium' can be transferred to the 'smart city' and 'smart region'.”
Campus FreeCity: German government's showcase project
On October 21, 2024, at the German government's 2024 Digital Summit, Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Vice Chancellor and Minister of Economic Affairs Dr. Robert Habeck and Minister of Transport Dr. Volker Wissing had the opportunity to see the results for themselves and find out about the potential of the EDAG CityBots and the possible scaling of the project.
Kerstin Bitterer, Head of Innovation and Network Management at the House of Logistics and Mobility (HOLM) GmbH, says: “Thanks to the interdisciplinary nature and huge potential of the FreeCity campus, we have gained comprehensive insights which are highly relevant to all challenges – technological, legal and communicative – involved in the move towards autonomous driving in the city."
Acceptance of technology is the key to innovative mobility solutions
One of the key driving forces behind the adoption of innovative mobility solutions and innovative automotive concepts such as the automated robot vehicle EDAG CityBot is acceptance of the technology. In the course of the project, more than 600 people were interviewed, to identify factors influencing the acceptance of automated vehicles, in particular the EDAG CityBot. The results show that trust in the technology and transparent communication are crucial for acceptance.
These findings were confirmed in user studies carried out by the Technical University of Darmstadt and the Fulda University of Applied Sciences in the real-world laboratory at the Deutsche Bank Park. In these studies, the concept for the communication and interaction of the EDAG CityBot with users developed in the project was evaluated in various use cases. A total of 44 test persons participated in three test series, in which they interacted with the EDAG CityBot in true-to-life scenarios. The test series included a passenger ride around the stadium grounds in the EDAG CityBot, a scenario involving an encounter with the EDAG CityBot from the point of view of a pedestrian crossing the street, and working with the EDAG CityBot from the perspective of a worker. Throughout all the test series, it was evident that first-hand experience of the innovative technology is crucial for reducing people's concerns and increasing their willingness to use it.
The suggestions for improvement and development strategies that were worked out with the project managers will be directly incorporated into the next development phase of human-vehicle communication.
Additional dialogue events were held, in which citizens were encouraged to take an active role in shaping their future mobility. Their most pressing concerns included the design of the vehicles, a user-friendly interface for the app used to manage the fleet, security aspects of autonomous driving and personal data, and the life-enhancing, functional design of public spaces. Ultimately, the reaction of the citizens involved to a fleet of highly automated robot vehicles was very positive: over two-thirds of the participants rated the CityBot concept as useful for their neighborhood, and almost 80 percent said they could imagine using such a service themselves.
Aspects of sustainability were examined in the course of the “Energy-efficient Artificial Intelligence” subproject at Fulda University of Applied Sciences. The focus here was on the use of energy-efficient processors to minimize the energy consumption of the CityBot as it processes images to recognize objects, people or traffic hazards.
Prof. Dr. Jan-Torsten Milde, Project Leader, Fulda University of Applied Sciences: "With our results, we aim to contribute to making autonomous vehicles such as the CityBot effective, easy and safe for everyone to use. The use of energy-efficient artificial intelligence in the fields of machine vision and voice control enables important steps to be taken in this direction."
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Stephan Rinderknecht, Project Leader, Technical University of Darmstadt: "When researching innovative and disruptive mobility concepts like the CityBot ecosystem, it is particularly important to employ an interdisciplinary approach, and to incorporate aspects of sustainability with the three dimensions of ecology, economy and social issues. Acting as scientific supervisors, the Technical University of Darmstadt to this end had five institutes involved in the project, to research all dimensions and achieve exciting scientific results for the mobility systems of the future."
With regard to the security of autonomous driving, T-Systems International, in the course of the project, developed and implemented a system for the teleoperation of vehicles, which can be transferred to other autonomous vehicles: this serves as a technical monitoring system in public road traffic. In situations where the autonomous driving system comes up against its limits, the teleoperator takes control and safely steers the vehicle through the traffic.
In the Campus FreeCity project, DEKRA tested the CityBot mobility concept for its eligibility for approval in accordance with European regulations/guidelines and established standards. The technological and approval-related knowledge gained in the project is to be used as a suitable method for testing comparable systems. In addition, the report on the state-of-the-art technology is to serve as a basis for clarifying open approval-related questions with technical committees and authorities.
Additional research was also carried out into ways of protecting autonomous driving from cyber attacks (Fulda University of Applied Sciences); a software application was developed to implement long-, medium- and short-term planning requirements for the logistical tasks of a CityBot fleet (Fulda University of Applied Sciences with the support of the University of the Federal Armed Forces in Munich), as were a capacity and traffic management system, action guidelines to be followed in the event of incidents (TU Darmstadt), and smart maintenance and repair planning (COMPREDICT).
The future of the EDAG CityBot
The project ended in October 2024. In the future, the CityBots will be tested and further developed in a new environment, namely the airport apron. After the real-world laboratory in the Deutsche Bank Park, the airport apron offers a similarly wide range of use cases, for instance passenger services, transport and service tasks. It offers the opportunity to further develop the system in a precisely delineated area with clearly defined processes, while at the same time providing the first feasible and scalable large-scale business case for a CityBot fleet.
Gerhard Körbel, Overall Project Manager Campus FreeCity, EDAG Group: "We see great potential for the EDAG CityBots and their ecosystem wherever an automated system can be used to replace repetitive tasks. The fact that our system works around the clock means that many tasks can be extended into the nighttime hours. This applies not only to municipal services in a city or stadium logistics, as in the Campus FreeCity real-world laboratory. As a first step, airports in particular offer an ideal platform here."
An overview of our current publications and further information about Campus FreeCity is available on the project website campusfreecity.de. Caption: The EDAG CityBot in the real-world laboratory at Deutsche Bank Park (Photos: EDAG Group)