Vehicle and Road Condition Monitoring as indispensable Base Layer for Automated Driving

The topic of automated driving has been finding its way from scientific and industrial research to specific (pre-)development projects in the vehicle industry for around ten years. Whereas the academic dialogue as well as in the industrial implementation focus on situation recognition and automated driving decisions, the driver task as the monitor of the technical condition of the vehicle and the road has to be automized additionally. Even though all relevant vehicle systems have suitable monitoring functions, several central monitoring tasks remain with the driver in conventional vehicles. This paper covers several monitoring tasks, that are usually covered by the driver and provides solutions to ensure safe operation of a fully automated vehicle.