MAN Truck & Bus is the first truck manufacturer to publish a 747-scene set of sensor and vehicle data from development drives for autonomous driving.
MAN Publishes Landmark Data for Autonomous Truck Development
The open exchange of such freely accessible and free data sets between different players, such as manufacturers, universities and software developers, who are working independently of each other on automated driving, accelerates development and promotes the standardisation of data formats. It also enables a standardised comparison of results and methods as a reference for scientific studies and simplifies collaboration with external development partners. “Data sets such as MAN TruckScenes are an important resource for data-driven development. There are already numerous publicly available data sets for the passenger car sector. But not for the truck sector. With MAN TruckScenes, we are moving forward to fill this gap,” says Dr. Frederik Zohm, Executive Board Member for Research and Development at MAN Truck & Bus.
MAN has published a data set that primarily maps driving operations on German highways, associated feeder routes, and terminal environments, focusing on hub-to-hub transportation as an application for driverless driving. The sensor set includes data from four cameras, six lidars, six radars, two inertial measurement units (IMS), and high-precision GNSS data. MAN TruckScenes is the first data set to feature 4D radar data with 360° coverage, making it the largest radar data set with an annotated 3D bounding box. The 747 scenes include various weather conditions, and the data is divided into training, test, and validation sets. Each scene contains sensor and vehicle data for a single driving sequence, along with annotations describing the driving situation and surrounding objects. This data supports machine learning for developing neural networks for autonomous driving, enabling standardised evaluation of performance and environment recognition. MAN TruckScenes is available for download at MAN TruckScenes.
The company is driving autonomous driving forward with various research and development projects. From 2018 to 2020, MAN developed and tested a driverless truck in container handling on the premises of the Port of Hamburg in a joint research and development project with Hamburger Hafen und Logistik AG. From 2019 to 2023, the Anita project with partners Deutsche Bahn, Fresenius University of Applied Sciences and Götting KG focused on the complete digital integration of an autonomous truck into the logistics process of container handling from road to rail. And since 2022, MAN has been working with eleven partners in the Atlas-L4 funding project to develop an autonomous truck for use in highway transport between logistics hubs. The project thus specifically addresses the law on autonomous driving passed in Germany in 2021, which already allows driverless driving on defined routes and with technical supervision. At the end of the project in 2025, practical test drives of the prototype with a safety driver on the highway are planned. Autonomous driving for trucks is set to enter series production at the end of the decade.
