Campus FreeCity: innovation project provides important insights for autonomous driving in the city

Frankfurt am Main, 16 January 2025 - After 35 months, the consortium of the Campus FreeCity mobility project, consisting of eight project partners from business and academic research as well as three associated partners, is delivering comprehensive findings for the introduction and establishment of autonomous, modular vehicles in the city.

About the project

Since November 2021, the Campus FreeCity project has been researching a complete ecosystem for mobility, transport and service tasks in the smart city on a laboratory scale in order to exploit the full potential of new fields of technology such as artificial intelligence, autonomous driving and the Internet of Things for the transport of the future. The modular CityBot vehicles, which are being developed by project initiator EDAG Group, are at the centre of the project, which is funded by the Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport Affairs.

The automated robotic vehicles are suitable for passenger transport as well as goods transport and for certain services that are required in a city. The following applications were tested in the real-world laboratory at Deutsche Bank Park: transporting people with limited mobility, delivering goods to kiosks, disposing of waste and green waste, watering green spaces and transporting workers and their work materials to the place of use.

The EDAG Group first presented the concept of highly automated robotic vehicles to the public in 2019. As part of the Campus FreeCity project, the enterprise was responsible for the extensive development and holistic system design and was able to achieve technology readiness level four (TRL 4) for the vehicles.

The modular vehicle concept is realised by a mechatronic coupling point between the train and utility modules. The robotic vehicles communicate via 5G mobile communications and the internet with an operation centre and the vehicle-external mobility backend developed by the EDAG Group. A specially developed booking system allows users to order the various transport and work services of the CityBots via a mobile phone or tablet with special applications.

The most important findings from the innovation project

As a result of the innovative Campus FreeCity project, important insights have been gained in the development of autonomous vehicle concepts, the safety of autonomous and connected vehicles, the development of safety and authorisation criteria and the acceptance of the technology by passengers, passers-by and other road users.

The results were achieved primarily through an intensive test phase lasting several months, during which specific use cases from stadium operations were trialled. EintrachtTech GmbH, the digital subsidiary of Eintracht Frankfurt, worked with the partners to define ten use cases from the areas of transporting people with limited mobility, logistics, green space irrigation and waste removal, which trained the basis for the practical testing of the CityBots in the real-world laboratory at Deutsche Bank Park. Potential user groups from stadium operations were actively involved in the test drives in order to obtain practical requirements.

Dr Oliver Bäcker, Head of Digital Centre "Arena of IoT", EintrachtTech GmbH: "Together with our partners, we are shaping innovations that also create added value for people in the city and region beyond the stadium. Deutsche Bank Park is the ideal testing ground for this. Many of the processes and requirements that occur in city centres can be found on the stadium site, meaning that findings from the 'Smart Stadium' can be transferred to the 'Smart City' and 'Smart Region'."

Campus FreeCity: flagship project of the federal government

On 21 October 2024, Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Vice Chancellor and Economics Minister Dr Robert Habeck and Transport Minister Dr Volker Wissing were also able to see the results for themselves as they learned about the potential of EDAG CityBots and the possible scaling of the project at the Federal Government's Digital Summit 2024.

Kerstin Bitterer, Head of Innovation and Network Management, House of Logistics and Mobility (HOLM) GmbH, says: "Thanks to the interdisciplinary and perspective-rich character of Campus FreeCity, we have gained comprise insights that are highly relevant for all challenges on the way to autonomous driving in the city - technologically, legally and communicatively."

Technology acceptance as the key to innovative mobility solutions

Technology acceptance is a key driver of the adoption of innovative mobility solutions and new automotive concepts such as the EDAG CityBot automated robot vehicle. As part of the project, over 600 people were surveyed to identify factors influencing the acceptance of automated vehicles and the EDAG CityBot in particular. The results show that trust in the technology and transparent communication are crucial for acceptance.

These findings were confirmed in user studies conducted by the Technical University of Darmstadt together with the Fulda University of Applied Sciences in the real-world laboratory at Deutsche Bank Park. In these university studies, the concept developed in the project for the communication and interaction of the EDAG CityBot with users was evaluated in various use cases. A total of 44 test subjects took part in three test series in which they interacted with the EDAG CityBot in realistic scenarios. The test series included a ride as a passenger in the EDAG CityBot on the stadium grounds, an encounter with the EDAG CityBot in a road crossing scenario from a pedestrian's perspective and collaboration with the EDAG CityBot from the perspective of a worker. Across all series of tests, it was shown that the direct experience of the innovative technology is crucial for reducing concerns and increasing willingness to use it.

The suggestions for improvement and development approaches worked out with the project managers will be incorporated directly into the next development phase of human-vehicle communication.

As part of additional dialogue events, citizens were encouraged to actively participate in shaping their future mobility. Their most important needs included the design of the vehicles, a user-friendly interface of the app for commissioning the vehicle fleet, safety aspects of autonomous driving and personal data as well as a liveable and functional design of the public space. As a result, the citizens involved were quite positive about a highly automated fleet of robotic vehicles: over two thirds of participants assessed the CityBot concept as useful for their neighbourhood, and almost 80 percent could imagine using such an offer themselves.

As part of the "Energy-efficient Artificial Intelligence" subproject at Fulda University of Applied Sciences, aspects of sustainability were analysed. The focus was on the use of energy-efficient processors in order to minimise the energy consumption of the CityBot when processing images to recognise objects, people or sources of danger in road traffic.

Prof Dr Jan-Torsten Milde, project manager, Fulda University of Applied Sciences: "With our results, we want to contribute to making autonomous vehicles such as the CityBot effective, simple and safe for everyone to use. The use of energy-efficient artificial intelligence in the areas of machine vision and voice control enables important steps to be taken in this direction."

Prof Dr Stephan Rinderknecht, project manager, Technische Universität Darmstadt: "When researching innovative and disruptive mobility concepts such as the CityBot ecosystem, it is particularly important to work in an interdisciplinary manner and to incorporate aspects of sustainability with the three dimensions of ecology, economy and social issues. To this end, TU Darmstadt was involved in the project as a scientific partner with five institutes in order to research all dimensions and achieve exciting academic results for the mobility systems of the future."

In terms of safeguarding autonomous driving, T-Systems International developed and implemented a system for the teleoperation of vehicles as technical supervision in public road traffic that can also be transferred to other autonomous vehicles as part of the project. In situations where the autonomous driving system reaches its limits, the teleoperator takes control and steers the vehicle safely through traffic.

As part of the Campus FreeCity project, DEKRA examined the approvability of the CityBot mobility concept in accordance with European regulations/guidelines and established standards. The technological and regulatory knowledge gained in the project is to be used as a suitable methodology for testing comparable systems. In addition, the report on the state of the art will serve as a basis for clarifying open questions of authorisation law with specialist bodies and authorities.

Research was also conducted into issues relating to protection against cyber attacks by autonomous driving (Fulda University of Applied Sciences); a software application was developed that can be used 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 Bundeswehr University Munich), a capacity and traffic management system as well as action guidelines for incidents (TU Darmstadt) and smart maintenance and repair planning (COMPREDICT).

The future of the EDAG CityBot

The project ended in October 2024, and in future the CityBots will be tested and further developed in a new environment, the airport apron. The airport apron offers an analogue variety of use cases following the real laboratory in Deutsche Bank Park, such as passenger transport, transport and service tasks. It offers the opportunity to further develop the system in a delimited space with clearly defined processes and at the same time represents the first large-scale business case for a CityBot fleet that can be implemented and scaled.

Gerhard Körbel, Overall Project Manager Campus FreeCity, EDAG Group: "We see great potential for EDAG CityBots and their ecosystem wherever recurring tasks can be replaced by an automated system. The fact that our system works around the clock means that many tasks can be extended to night-time operations. This not only applies to municipal service tasks in a city or the logistics of a stadium, as in the FreeCity Campus real-world laboratory. Airports in particular offer an ideal platform here as a first step."

An overview of our current publications and further information about Campus FreeCity is available on the project website campusfreecity.de.

Research contact (Fulda University of Applied Sciences):
Dr Rainer Blum
Email: rainer.blum@informatik.hs-fulda.de