As highly automated driving is transitioning from single-vehicle closed-access testing to commercial deployments of public ride-hailing in selected areas (e.g., Waymo), automated driving and connected cooperative intelligent transport systems (C-ITS) remain active fields of research. Even though simulation is omnipresent in the development and validation life cycle of automated and connected driving technology, the complex nature of public road traffic and software that masters it still requires real-world integration and testing with actual vehicles. Dedicated vehicles for research and development allow testing and validation of software and hardware components under real-world conditions early on. They also enable collecting and publishing real-world datasets that let others conduct research without vehicle access, and support early demonstration of futuristic use cases. In this paper, we present karl., our new research vehicle for automated and connected driving. Apart from major corporations, few institutions worldwide have access to their own L4-capable research vehicles, restricting their ability to carry out independent research. This paper aims to help bridge that gap by sharing the reasoning, design choices, and technical details that went into making karl. a flexible and powerful platform for research, engineering, and validation in the context of automated and connected driving. More impressions of karl. are available at https://karl.ac.

翻译：随着高度自动驾驶正从单车封闭测试转向特定区域（如Waymo）的公共网约车商业部署，自动驾驶与网联协同智能交通系统（C-ITS）仍是活跃的研究领域。尽管仿真技术在自动驾驶与网联驾驶技术的开发验证全生命周期中无处不在，但公共道路交通及其控制软件的复杂性仍需在实际车辆上进行真实世界的集成与测试。专用于研发的车辆能够早期在真实条件下对软硬件组件进行测试验证，同时支持收集并发布真实世界数据集，使其他研究者无需车辆即可开展研究，并助力未来应用场景的早期演示。本文介绍了我们新型的自动驾驶与网联驾驶研究平台karl.。除大型企业外，全球仅有少数机构拥有自身的L4级研究车辆，这限制了其开展独立研究的能力。本文通过分享karl.的设计思路、技术选型与实现细节，旨在帮助弥合这一差距，使其成为自动驾驶与网联驾驶领域兼具灵活性与强大功能的研究、工程及验证平台。更多关于karl.的展示可访问 https://karl.ac。