Welcome to PRORETA

PRORETA is an interdisciplinary research cooperation between universities and Continental AG. The aim of the research cooperation is to develop advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving (AD) functions to prevent traffic accidents.

The name PRORETA was chosen in reference to the identically named member of the crew of Roman warships. The Proreta stood in the bow of the ship (Prora) and warned of shoals and other hazards.

Within the framework of this successful cooperation, scientists from Technical University of Darmstadt and Continental have been working together since 2002 on innovative driver assistance and driving safety systems – currently in the PRORETA 5 project.

PRORETA 5 – urbAn drIving

The goal of the research project PRORETA 5 is the investigation of artificial intelligence methods for automated driving. The project focuses on situation understanding and motion planning for automated driving in urban traffic. For this purpose, Continental cooperates with the Institute of Automotive Engineering (FZD) and the Control Methods and Robotics Lab (rmr) at TU Darmstadt, the Institute of Cognitive Neuroinformatics (CNI) at University of Bremen and the Faculty of Automatic Control and Computer Engineering (FACCE) at TU Iaşi.

In particular, the project aims at understanding driver actions, environmental context, traffic rules and the interaction between road users. The goal is to implement humanized motion planning and achieve understanding of driver attention in relation to external objects and situations, by learning from driver behavior. Furthermore, such a holistic approach allows to implement a robust object and scene recognition as well as situation understanding. In addition, it enables the derivation of feature reduction and compression methods and to determine complex maneuvers for adaptive and cooperative driving strategies in regard to environmental influences. Furthermore, the AI will be integrated and tested under real world conditions in a real car, using modern systems engineering methodology.

Learn more about the fields of research

PRORETA 5 is the fifth iteration of the successful research cooperation between Continental and TU Darmstadt, which is based on the results and experiences of the previous projects:

PRORETA 1 : emergency brake and evasion assistance

PRORETA 2 : overtaking assistance

PRORETA 3 : integral safety concept and cooperative automation

PRORETA 4 : safety by learning

In PRORETA 5 the cooperation was supplemented by the University of Bremen and the TU Iasi as research partners.