arXiv subjects

Markus Lienkamp

Publications and source records attributed to Markus Lienkamp.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Stability Control for Real World Testing in Autonomous Racing

Controlling an autonomous vehicle at the limits of handling is a challenging task. Due to external influences, such as road conditions or weather, a vehicle can easily become unstable. Since most control algorithms assume stable vehicle behavior, they might fail in these situations. Especially when operating expensive vehicles without a safety driver on board, as in autonomous racing, this poses a significant challenge. To enable safe operation at the vehicle's dynamic limits, we present a comprehensive stability control system that safeguards motion control algorithms in autonomous driving. The proposed system consists of an electronic stability control (ESC), a slip control (SC), and a countersteer system (CS), which collectively adapt steering and brake commands from the motion controller to maintain vehicle stability. We validate our approach through both simulation and experiments on a real-world, full-scale vehicle. The results show that the stability control system maintains vehicle stability in critical situations and extends the operational feasible region. To simplify integration, we provide an open-source implementation at github.com/TUMFTM/tam-stability-control.

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arXiv2026

Beyond the Plane: Coupling Planar Vehicle Dynamics with Three-Dimensional Road Geometry

Simulation is crucial for developing and testing autonomous driving systems. In particular, the development of localization and control algorithms relies on an accurate vehicle dynamics simulation. However, most vehicle dynamics models are two-dimensional while real-world roads are three-dimensional. For example, effects from the three-dimensional road geometry on the Las Vegas Motor Speedway can increase the normal forces on the tires by more than 66% compared to the nominal load at standstill. As a result, even highly detailed planar vehicle dynamics models struggle to accurately reproduce the real vehicle's behavior. While solutions for three-dimensional vehicle dynamics exist, they are rarely adopted, computationally expensive, and complex. To address this issue, we present a novel method to couple planar vehicle dynamics models with real-world three-dimensional road geometry. We transform the planar vehicle state from the vehicle model's two-dimensional plane to its corresponding representation in three-dimensional space. Additionally, we calculate road-geometry-induced forces and moments and apply them to the planar vehicle model. We validate our approach using high-speed data recorded with a full-scale race car on the banked Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Furthermore, on synthetic tracks, we show that our method yields accurate results even in edge cases. Together, our results demonstrate that the gap between planar simulation and real-world three-dimensional roads can be closed without abandoning simpler planar models. To simplify adoption of our method, we provide the implementation as open-source software on github.com/TUMFTM/3d-road-geometry-coupling.

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arXiv2026

A2RL V\textsubscript{max}: The A2RL autonomous racing dataset for long-range, high-speed perception and multi-vehicle interaction

In autonomous driving development, a perception dataset is crucial, as it provides fundamental data for training, testing, and validating algorithms for an autonomous vehicle's multimodal perception systems. So far, most research has concentrated on providing datasets for well-structured urban environments. This work introduces the A2RL V\textsubscript{max} open-source dataset, specifically designed for perception tasks in high-speed autonomous driving and multi-vehicle interaction. The dataset was captured during the 2024 Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League (A2RL), held at the Yas Marina F1 Circuit, with participation from all competing teams. It contains diverse scenarios, including single-vehicle data at varying speeds, multi-vehicle sessions, and the full final four-vehicle race. The dataset contains almost 30,000 professionally annotated LiDAR point clouds, along with RADAR point clouds. In particular, it is the first large-scale dataset in autonomous racing to feature professionally annotated LiDAR point clouds, enabling deep learning-based perception research. The data is provided in a developer-friendly format, enabling easy implementation and evaluation in future research. We provide implementation and evaluation for off-the-shelf 3D detection and tracking methods. Although baseline methods show promising results for both 3D detection and tracking, specialized methods are required to address the unique challenges of high-speed autonomous driving. For a detailed description of the dataset, please visit the \href{https://tum-avs.github.io/A2RL_Dataset_website/}{A2RL V\textsubscript{max} Dataset Website}

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arXiv2026

Is Energy Guidance All You Need? Training-Free Norm Injection for Driving World Models

Driving world models built on large video-diffusion backbones generate realistic scenes but are hard to control: enforcing a traffic norm typically means retraining the backbone or conditioning it on hand-built layouts. We ask whether controllability requires training at all. Our experiment shows that a rectified-flow driving world model, which jointly generates future video and a planned ego trajectory, can have its planned trajectory steered entirely at sampling time by differentiable energy functions that encode driving norms, without knowledge-specific retraining of the diffusion backbone. Concretely, we demonstrate that a world model built on Open-Sora 2.0 MM-DiT backbone can be steered to brake at a counterfactual target by injecting energy guidance at sampling time. However, we find that the generated video does not yet follow the steered trajectory through the backbone's joint self-attention and identify the cross-stream coupling as a crucial requirement for end-to-end-controllable rollouts.

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arXiv2026

Drifting in the Future: Stabilizing Path Following Drifting on High-Latency Vehicle Systems

Autonomously controlling and handling a vehicle at and beyond its stability limit is a mathematically and computationally demanding task. Prior demonstrations of automated drifting have been limited to research platforms with instantaneous torque delivery and independently actuated wheels, leaving their applicability to production vehicles with actuator latencies and mechanically coupled axles uncertain. To overcome these issues, we design a predictor to compensate for powertrain delays, develop a revised control formulation to accommodate higher actuation latencies as well as a differential coupling on the driven axle, and introduce brake-based velocity stabilization. This paper presents the controller framework, the model extensions, and real-world experimental results. We observe that our controller enables a production sports car with a combustion engine to robustly sustain circular and figure-eight drifts, limiting lateral error to 1.1 m and sideslip overshoot to 0.06 rad despite actuator delays exceeding 250 ms, while mitigating oscillations and maintaining stable path and sideslip tracking. In conclusion, our results establish that autonomous drifting is feasible on production-ready vehicles, opening pathways to advanced safety systems capable of stabilizing cars in scenarios where traditional control fails.

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arXiv2026

FAR-LIO: Enabling High-Speed Autonomy through Fast, Accurate, and Robust LiDAR-Inertial Odometry

Robust and accurate odometry estimation is essential in modern robotics. In environments characterized by highly dynamic motion and sensor noise, odometry estimation becomes increasingly challenging. Autonomous racing combines both factors in an unstructured setting, where minimizing odometry latency is essential for stable closed-loop control. This paper introduces FAR-LIO, a highly optimized CUDA-accelerated LiDAR-inertial odometry framework developed for Fast, Accurate, and Robust performance. Our system leverages a novel CUDA-based voxel hashmap to enable parallelized nearest-neighbor search and efficient map updates. We employ a sparsity-aware Generalized Iterative Closest Point algorithm with adaptive thresholding on top of the CUDA-based voxel hashmap with adaptive density to achieve low-latency without compromising accuracy. An Extended Kalman Filter serves as a robust backend. It utilizes an upsampling and delay compensation strategy to fuse the LiDAR odometry with high-frequency IMU data, thereby ensuring a robust and smooth odometry output. We evaluate FAR-LIO across four different sensor setups, using both public datasets and data from two autonomous racecars driving at speeds of up to 250 km/h. FAR-LIO achieves an average 6.9% reduction in the positional error and 38.4% lower runtime compared to state-of-the-art baselines on target hardware using a single parameter set. This demonstrates its computational efficiency and broad applicability. To build upon our work, our code is available open-source on https://github.com/TUMFTM/FAR-LIO.

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arXiv2026

SPARK: Low Latency Single-Camera 3D Pose Estimation for Autonomous Racing using Keypoints

In autonomous racing, fast detection of other participants' movements is required to plan safe, collision-free trajectories with non-cooperative opponents. LiDAR detection is inherently slower and harder to deploy on edge devices than vision methods, causing delayed detections that limit object tracking performance during high-dynamic maneuvering. Utilizing monocular 3D detection enables an easy-to-deploy, low-latency detection of other participants on the racetrack. We present SPARK, a single-camera pose-estimation algorithm for autonomous racing using keypoint detection. It achieves long-range detection with high accuracy, exceeding the performance of state-of-the-art monocular camera detection algorithms while maintaining lower latency. By employing well-optimized YOLO models and leveraging the fixed geometry in the autonomous racing domain, the algorithm also exhibits low latency and resource usage. We evaluate the performance of our approach on real-world autonomous racing data and compare it to state-of-the-art LiDAR and camera detection algorithms. The source code is available at: https://github.com/TUMFTM/SPARK-camera-det

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arXiv2026

Taming Perception Jitter: Uncertainty-Aware LiDAR Object Detection for Reliable Motion Classification

Reliable motion classification is critical for autonomous driving, as false dynamic predictions of static objects can cascade into unnecessary planner interventions. Unstable bounding box predictions can lead to spurious velocity estimates in tracking and falsely predicted trajectories. We present a deployment-friendly mitigation strategy that augments a 3D object detector with aleatoric uncertainty estimates and applies a two-sample z-test over short observation windows to separate true motion from jitter. Integrated into Autoware with minimal changes, the approach reuses existing data association for minimal compute overhead. Empirical results show parity with velocity thresholding on nuScenes, but substantially fewer false dynamic predictions and unnecessary stops in real-world test drives, explained by the presence of an intermediate jitter band in the recorded data that speed-only rules misclassify. This demonstrates that uncertainty-aware detection and lightweight statistical testing can deliver practical performance gains for autonomous driving in noisier real-world settings.

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arXiv2026

Head-to-Head autonomous racing at the limits of handling in the A2RL challenge

Autonomous racing presents a complex challenge involving multi-agent interactions between vehicles operating at the limit of performance and dynamics. As such, it provides a valuable research and testing environment for advancing autonomous driving technology and improving road safety. This article presents the algorithms and deployment strategies developed by the TUM Autonomous Motorsport team for the inaugural Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League (A2RL). We showcase how our software emulates human driving behavior, pushing the limits of vehicle handling and multi-vehicle interactions to win the A2RL. Finally, we highlight the key enablers of our success and share our most significant learnings.

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arXiv2026

Analyzing the Impact of Simulation Fidelity on the Evaluation of Autonomous Driving Motion Control

Simulation is crucial in the development of autonomous driving software. In particular, assessing control algorithms requires an accurate vehicle dynamics simulation. However, recent publications use models with varying levels of detail. This disparity makes it difficult to compare individual control algorithms. Therefore, this paper aims to investigate the influence of the fidelity of vehicle dynamics modeling on the closed-loop behavior of trajectory-following controllers. For this purpose, we introduce a comprehensive Autoware-compatible vehicle model. By simplifying this, we derive models with varying fidelity. Evaluating over 550 simulation runs allows us to quantify each model's approximation quality compared to real-world data. Furthermore, we investigate whether the influence of model simplifications changes with varying margins to the acceleration limit of the vehicle. From this, we deduce to which degree a vehicle model can be simplified to evaluate control algorithms depending on the specific application. The real-world data used to validate the simulation environment originate from the Indy Autonomous Challenge race at the Autodromo Nazionale di Monza in June 2023. They show the fastest fully autonomous lap of TUM Autonomous Motorsport, with vehicle speeds reaching 267 kph and lateral accelerations of up to 15 mps2.

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arXiv2026

FlowCalib: LiDAR-to-Vehicle Miscalibration Detection using Scene Flows

Accurate sensor-to-vehicle calibration is essential for safe autonomous driving. Angular misalignments of LiDAR sensors can lead to safety-critical issues during autonomous operation. However, current methods primarily focus on correcting sensor-to-sensor errors without considering the miscalibration of individual sensors that cause these errors in the first place. We introduce FlowCalib, the first framework that detects LiDAR-to-vehicle miscalibration using motion cues from the scene flow of static objects. Our approach leverages the systematic bias induced by rotational misalignment in the flow field generated from sequential 3D point clouds, eliminating the need for additional sensors. The architecture integrates a neural scene flow prior for flow estimation and incorporates a dual-branch detection network that fuses learned global flow features with handcrafted geometric descriptors. These combined representations allow the system to perform two complementary binary classification tasks: a global binary decision indicating whether misalignment is present and separate, axis-specific binary decisions indicating whether each rotational axis is misaligned. Experiments on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate FlowCalib's ability to robustly detect miscalibration, establishing a benchmark for sensor-to-vehicle miscalibration detection.

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arXiv2026

RSLCPP -- Deterministic Simulations Using ROS 2

Simulation is crucial in real-world robotics, offering safe, scalable, and efficient environments for developing a variety of robotic applications. While the Robot Operating System (ROS) has been widely adopted as the backbone of these robotic applications in both academia and industry, its asynchronous, multi-process design complicates reproducibility, especially across varying hardware platforms. Deterministic callback execution cannot be guaranteed when computation times and communication delays vary. This lack of reproducibility complicates scientific benchmarking and continuous integration, where consistent results are essential. To address this, we present a methodology to create deterministic simulations using ROS 2 nodes. Our ROS Simulation Library for C++ (RSLCPP) implements this approach, enabling existing nodes to be combined into a simulation routine that yields reproducible results, usually without requiring any source code changes. We demonstrate that our approach produces identical results across various CPUs and architectures when testing both a synthetic benchmark and a real-world robotics system. RSLCPP is open-sourced at https://github.com/TUMFTM/rslcpp.

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arXiv2025

Calibrating the Full Predictive Class Distribution of 3D Object Detectors for Autonomous Driving

In autonomous systems, precise object detection and uncertainty estimation are critical for self-aware and safe operation. This work addresses confidence calibration for the classification task of 3D object detectors. We argue that it is necessary to regard the calibration of the full predictive confidence distribution over all classes and deduce a metric which captures the calibration of dominant and secondary class predictions. We propose two auxiliary regularizing loss terms which introduce either calibration of the dominant prediction or the full prediction vector as a training goal. We evaluate a range of post-hoc and train-time methods for CenterPoint, PillarNet and DSVT-Pillar and find that combining our loss term, which regularizes for calibration of the full class prediction, and isotonic regression lead to the best calibration of CenterPoint and PillarNet with respect to both dominant and secondary class predictions. We further find that DSVT-Pillar can not be jointly calibrated for dominant and secondary predictions using the same method.

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arXiv2025

To New Beginnings: A Survey of Unified Perception in Autonomous Vehicle Software

Autonomous vehicle perception typically relies on modular pipelines that decompose the task into detection, tracking, and prediction. While interpretable, these pipelines suffer from error accumulation and limited inter-task synergy. Unified perception has emerged as a promising paradigm that integrates these sub-tasks within a shared architecture, potentially improving robustness, contextual reasoning, and efficiency while retaining interpretable outputs. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of unified perception, introducing a holistic and systemic taxonomy that categorizes methods along task integration, tracking formulation, and representation flow. We define three paradigms -Early, Late, and Full Unified Perception- and systematically review existing methods, their architectures, training strategies, datasets used, and open-source availability, while highlighting future research directions. This work establishes the first comprehensive framework for understanding and advancing unified perception, consolidates fragmented efforts, and guides future research toward more robust, generalizable, and interpretable perception.

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arXiv2025

Why we need a standardized state of health definition for electric vehicle battery packs -- a proposal for energy- and capacity-based metrics

Range and performance are key customer-relevant properties of electric vehicles. Both degrade over time due to battery aging, thus impacting business decisions throughout a vehicle's lifecycle, such as efficient utilization and asset valuation. For practical assessment, aging is often simplified into a single figure of merit - the state of health - typically defined by the battery pack's remaining capacity or energy. However, no standardized method for measuring the state of health at the vehicle level has been established, leaving both academia and industry without a clear consensus. Ultimately, standardization is crucial to increase transparency and build confidence in the long-term reliability of electric vehicles' battery packs. In this article, we propose a standard measurement procedure for assessing the capacity- and energy-based state of health, leveraging onboard charging to enable reproducibility and scalability. Additionally, we demonstrate how differential voltage analysis can provide deeper insights into battery aging at the vehicle level.

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arXiv2025

VESPA: Towards un(Human)supervised Open-World Pointcloud Labeling for Autonomous Driving

Data collection for autonomous driving is rapidly accelerating, but manual annotation, especially for 3D labels, remains a major bottleneck due to its high cost and labor intensity. Autolabeling has emerged as a scalable alternative, allowing the generation of labels for point clouds with minimal human intervention. While LiDAR-based autolabeling methods leverage geometric information, they struggle with inherent limitations of lidar data, such as sparsity, occlusions, and incomplete object observations. Furthermore, these methods typically operate in a class-agnostic manner, offering limited semantic granularity. To address these challenges, we introduce VESPA, a multimodal autolabeling pipeline that fuses the geometric precision of LiDAR with the semantic richness of camera images. Our approach leverages vision-language models (VLMs) to enable open-vocabulary object labeling and to refine detection quality directly in the point cloud domain. VESPA supports the discovery of novel categories and produces high-quality 3D pseudolabels without requiring ground-truth annotations or HD maps. On Nuscenes dataset, VESPA achieves an AP of 52.95% for object discovery and up to 46.54% for multiclass object detection, demonstrating strong performance in scalable 3D scene understanding. Code will be available upon acceptance.

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arXiv2025

HeAL3D: Heuristical-enhanced Active Learning for 3D Object Detection

Active Learning has proved to be a relevant approach to perform sample selection for training models for Autonomous Driving. Particularly, previous works on active learning for 3D object detection have shown that selection of samples in uncontrolled scenarios is challenging. Furthermore, current approaches focus exclusively on the theoretical aspects of the sample selection problem but neglect the practical insights that can be obtained from the extensive literature and application of 3D detection models. In this paper, we introduce HeAL (Heuristical-enhanced Active Learning for 3D Object Detection) which integrates those heuristical features together with Localization and Classification to deliver the most contributing samples to the model's training. In contrast to previous works, our approach integrates heuristical features such as object distance and point-quantity to estimate the uncertainty, which enhance the usefulness of selected samples to train detection models. Our quantitative evaluation on KITTI shows that HeAL presents competitive mAP with respect to the State-of-the-Art, and achieves the same mAP as the full-supervised baseline with only 24% of the samples.

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arXiv2025

Inconsistency-based Active Learning for LiDAR Object Detection

Deep learning models for object detection in autonomous driving have recently achieved impressive performance gains and are already being deployed in vehicles worldwide. However, current models require increasingly large datasets for training. Acquiring and labeling such data is costly, necessitating the development of new strategies to optimize this process. Active learning is a promising approach that has been extensively researched in the image domain. In our work, we extend this concept to the LiDAR domain by developing several inconsistency-based sample selection strategies and evaluate their effectiveness in various settings. Our results show that using a naive inconsistency approach based on the number of detected boxes, we achieve the same mAP as the random sampling strategy with 50% of the labeled data.

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