My Dream Came True to Work as Developer in Driving Assistance Systems
My Name is Ahmed Alhabrok, I am 29 years old, originally from Egypt, and I am function developer at motion control. I obtained my master’s degree in the automotive field 4 years ago from the university of Ingolstadt in Bavaria. My story with automotive began 10 years ago when I was in a summer course in Munich with my home university from Egypt. During this course I had the chance to visit a research group at TU Munich working with a camera from Continental testing a lane departure warning feature. I was really fascinated by this interesting field. As a result, after my bachelors two years later I came to Germany for my master’s degree in Driving Assistance Systems. Afterwards I had the chance to try software development in different fields like transmissions or working in testing positions. After 3 years I realized this position isn’t challenging enough for me.
I always had a dream to develop and to have a great influence in the field of Driving Assistance Systems. 2018 was an outstanding year, because I joined Continental Advanced Driver Assistance System Business Unit. I was lucky to join an outstanding young dynamic multicultural team. We learn from each-other, we share the joy of creation new products, and we are there for each-other. All these helped me to integrate easily in Continentals spirit and values. Our team is responsible for the motion control which is a part of the cruising functions and hence part of driving functions. This seems to be quite complicated, so let me explain
Cruising function is a function that automatically controls speed (Longitudinal cruising function; i.g, adaptive cruise control or shortly ACC) or position and orientation (lateral cruising function; i.g. lane keeping assist).
While motion control is responsible for transformation of a given valid trajectory and the current ego vehicle position into appropriate actuator commands in order to keep the vehicle on its intended path, so motion control is really an important key player in the cruising functions, as it is the last interface to the actuator, so precision and accuracy are important criteria for us.
Motion control consists of three parts:
- Trajectory planner: calculates the optimal trajectory given from sensors within allowed physical limit.
- Trajectory controller: validates the output from sensors and trajectory planner, realize appropriate maneuvers and tune the dynamic controller.
- Dynamic controller: applies proper, and comfortable actuator commands to keep the vehicle in its intended path.
I work with trajectory planner, which is the first connection between sensors’ world and actuators’ world. I have to adapt the trajectory planner to work with different cruising functions (for example traffic jam assist, lane keeping assist and emergency steering assist) and also assures that the generated trajectories are within the physical limit of the vehicle. All these requires a lot of communications with colleagues from sensorics department and actuator department, which I do really enjoy from day to day during my experience at Continental.
This article was written by our employee.
Ahmed Alhabrok
