UNICARagil - Research Collaboration on the Mobility of the Future

Leading German universities have joined forces in the BMBF's UNICARagil research network to redevelop the automobile and its development processes. A research team from the University of Passau is also involved.

Autonomous electric vehicles will play a key role in overcoming the challenges posed by the increasing need for mobility and urbanisation. They will create the basis for sustainable and intelligent road traffic, innovative mobility and transport concepts as well as improvements in traffic safety and quality of life in urban areas.

In the UNICARagil project, completely driverless electric vehicles will be developed on the basis of the latest research results on automated and networked driving and electric mobility. The basis for this is a modular and scalable vehicle concept consisting of a utility and drive unit. It can be flexibly adapted to a wide range of applications in logistics and passenger transport, which can be exploited in particular by driverless, emission-free vehicles. The core element of the research and development work is the functional vehicle architecture, which is linked up to the cloud, the road infrastructure and a sensor drone. Additional focal points include the development of generic sensor modules for detecting surroundings, a flexibly expandable and updatable software and hardware architecture as well as highly dynamic wheel hub drives that allow completely new forms of mobility in road traffic. The project concludes with a demonstration in four different applications on test fields in Germany.

Among other things, the novel approach of the project provides for the comprehensive linking up of vehicles with their respective surroundings. To this end, it will be important to protect user data and ward off possible cyber attacks. A team led by Prof. Dr. Stefan Katzenbeisser, Chair of Computer Engineering at the University of Passau, will design and develop a corresponding IT security architecture that includes a package of measures for the defence and detection of cyber attacks that could have devastating consequences for passenger security. The designed architecture will be prototypically implemented in the UNICARagil vehicles.

The UNICARagil project will run for four years. It is supported by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research within the framework of the funding priority “Disruptive vehicle concepts for autonomous electric mobility” (Auto-Dis). The project volume amounts to EUR 23.3 million (94 percent of which is funded by the BMBF). 

Members of the consortium are the University of Passau, the RWTH Aachen, the TU Braunschweig, the TU Darmstadt, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, the TU Munich, the University of Stuttgart and the University of Ulm as well as the industrial partners ATLATEC GmbH, flyXdrive GmbH, iMAR Navigation GmbH, IPG Automotive GmbH, Schaeffler Technologies AG & Co. KG and VIRES Simulationstechnologie GmbH.

Picture reference:
Picture of two men explaining the model of an autonomous electrific car; UNICARagil