Autonomous Driving in Adverse Weather (ADAW): Going from Autonomous to Snowtonomous Vehicles

Automated mobility is rapidly growing, and significant investments have been made globally into the development of autonomous vehicle technology over the last decade. There exist various companies and academic institutes, investing a significant amount of financial, scientific, and infrastructural resources to develop and test advanced AI-based automated driving algorithms. Companies have different test fleets, collecting data over millions of kilometers on public roads. However, not every kilometer driven is equal, and most of the automated vehicles have, so far, been primarily trained and tested under clear weather. This bias brings a significant challenge when it comes to testing automated driving functions in harsh weather conditions such as dense fog, heavy rain, and snowfall, which vastly affect the functioning of sensors and the performance of perception and control algorithms. ADAW aims to bring together academia and industry to discuss how to develop robust sense-perceive-control pipelines and weather-aware decision-making systems, working reliably under extreme weather conditions. In the context of automated mobility, the main objective of ADAW is to address weather-related challenges and reconcile various hardware (e.g., sensor combinations) and software (e.g., AI-based algorithms) approaches for downstream perception tasks (e.g., semantic scene segmentation and object detection). This workshop will also compare the state-of-the-art solutions allowing vehicles to navigate autonomously in all weather conditions, opening new doors to go from autonomous to snowtonomous vehicles.