Pioneering Off-Road Autonomy

Location: Workshop Room II (on-site), Hofburg, Vienna
Date: September 17, 2025
Time: 16:00 – 17:30 CEST

Hosts

Workshop description 

As the automotive industry advances beyond passenger car autonomy, autonomous robotics is increasingly coming into focus, particularly in sectors such as agriculture, construction, and mining, where regional and operational challenges demand innovative solutions. 

Off-road autonomous platforms face unique hurdles: unstructured terrain, limited connectivity, harsh environmental conditions, and incomplete or unreliable mapping data. To address these complexities, off-road systems increasingly rely on local sensor data and robust and safety-focused physical AI, executed on deterministic edge computing platforms with high system availability. 

To meet these demands, driveblocks and Infineon have jointly developed a prototype system that integrates resource-aware algorithms optimized for real-time embedded hardware. Built on a modular and scalable architecture, this platform supports a broad variety of Infineon microcontrollers and selectable AI accelerators, enabling modular deployments. 

This workshop invites participants to engage in discussions, share insights, and explore real-world technical approaches to advancing off-road autonomy. The topics to be addressed in this workshop are: 

• We show the deployment of a full software stack for off-road vehicles, comprising the real-time operating system Zephyr, the middleware micro-ROS, and an ADAS application software to a hardware combination of AI-accelerators and Infineon microcontrollers. 
• We demonstrate how a modular application software layer can combine the strengths of artificial intelligence and well-known deterministic algorithms to develop a scalable, efficient, and safety-certifiable solution for unique off-road conditions. 

Workshop Speakers

• Thomas Herrmann, Co-founder – driveblocks
• Juergen Schaefer, Distinguished Engineer System Architecture – Infineon