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Innovation Stream Overview
Working Groups
Working Groups play a central role in the daily work of The Autonomous, enabling a wide range of experts from industry and academia to collaborate on specific safety-critical challenges of autonomous driving.
Together, they develop pre-competitive concepts, technical solutions, best practices, and recommendations in key areas of autonomous driving – from E/E architectures and artificial intelligence to regulatory frameworks and public acceptance.
Our Working Groups are time-limited and provide a platform for The Autonomous Members to take collective action and advance safe autonomous mobility through concrete solutions.
General Setup
Facilitator
The Autonomous
Responsibilities
- Neutral Position
- Organizational work
- Onboards members
- Promotion of the WG outcome
- Legal negotiations
- Facilitates meetings
- Coordinates units
Working Group Lead
Responsibilities
- Neutral Position
- Scope definition
- Nominates chairperson for 1st period (responsibilities: moderation, co-ordination, mediates conflict resolution)
Working Group Members
Responsibilities
- Financial contribution
- Personal contribution
- Approves final documents
External Reviewers
Responsibilities
- Review technical content
- Consult
Working Group Safety & Architecture
The scope of this Working Group is to define the state-of-the-art in safety architecture for safe self-driving cars (SAE L4 and higher).
The main technical areas of cooperation of the Working Group “Safety & Architecture” include:
- Defining a list of key terms, assumptions, and target safety goals for self-driving cars.
- Investigating multiple conceptual architecture candidates that meet the target safety goals. All members are encouraged to provide their conceptual architecture for discussion.
- Structuring the conceptual architecture into appropriate subsystems and defining fault-containment units.
- Communication subsystems that connect to sensors and actuators as part of the conceptual architecture.
Working Group Lead:
Timeline
Reports
- 1st report (December 2023): The Autonomous Safety & Architecture Full Report: Unlocking Key Findings
- 2nd report (September 2025): The Autonomous Working Group Safety & Architecture Second Report
Topics for 2026
Following the success of the second report, the working group will address new topics through whitepapers to be published by September 2026:
- HW integration: define patterns and constraints for consolidating multiple functional domains onto a single SoC while ensuring Freedom from Interference and Sufficient Independence for centralized automotive HW platforms.
- AI architecture: describe how AI-based components reshape conceptual system architectures and how the various standards (e.g., ISO 26262, ISO 21448, and ISO 8800) can be coherently incorporated into a unified development and assurance process.
- Sufficient Independence for SOTIF: define how to achieve Sufficient Independence for functional insufficiencies and develop a quantitative concept of SOTIF-specific Independence Coverage.
We have additional topics in the pipeline, which we are happy to further refine together with potential new working group participants!
Working Group
From left to right: Georg Niedrist (Senior Consultant, private contributor), Shailesh More (Safety Assessment & Innovation – NXP), Sascha Drenkelforth (Principal Safety Consultant – TTTech Auto), Udo Dannebaum (Senior Principal Engineer Automotive Applications – Infineon), Gabi Escuela (Functional Safety Engineer Embedded Software – private contributor), Christian Mangold (Senior Functional Safety Manager – TTTech Auto), Moritz Antlanger (Expert Safety Consultant – TTTech Auto).
Contributors & Reviewers
Private Contributors
Ayhan Mehmed
Chaitanya Shinde
Christoph Schulze
Gabi Escuela
Lucas Fryzek
Marius Weiss
Matthew Storr
Nahla Ben Mosbeh
Shailesh More
Expert Circles
The Autonomous Expert Circles brought together ambitious experts and industry thought leaders with specialized knowledge and experience in specific AV topics to collaborate, share insights, and discuss potential solutions to the challenges that faced the development and adoption of autonomous vehicles.
Expert Circle Safety of Embedded AI
Artificial intelligence is a key enabler of autonomous driving. While it is already widely accepted for perception and scene understanding to increase dependability, the use of AI for trajectory planning and control is relatively new.
To close this gap, Infineon Technologies and The Autonomous called on global key industry players and research institutes to collaborate and join forces in order to create a common understanding of how to use AI safely for trajectory planning and control, thus enhanced existing classical algorithms.
Expert Circle Lead:
Kick-off: September 2022
Final report release on: 26 Feb 2025
Read the outcome: Report: Key Insights from The Autonomous Expert Circle on Safety of Embedded AI
Expert Circle Safety & Regulation
The successful and safe deployment of autonomous driving (AD) technologies across the globe is considered one of the most significant challenges in the mobility industry. The difficulty of defining and complying with all relevant regulatory requirements and standards from various organizations adds to this complexity.
In this Expert Circle, the members discussed:
- Current challenges, developments, and practices in compliance, validation, and standardization of autonomous driving
- Requirements that autonomous driving systems have to meet to be street legal
- Challenges and differences in the rule perception of humans and machines
- Regulations for both conventional and autonomous vehicles, with and without a human driver
Expert Circle Leads:
Kick-off: November 2022
Final report release on: 13 September 2023
Read the outcome: Unveiling The Autonomous Safety & Regulation Report
