On September 18, 2024, the final presentation of the Campus FreeCity project, funded by the Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport (BMDV), took place. During the meeting, the funding body BMDV and the project management agency BAV were presented with the approach and results developed in various work packages since the project's start in November 2021, which focused on the development of the connected fleet of modular robotic vehicles, CityBots, along with an outlook on further research and development needs.

Nina Theobald, Sarah Schwindt-Drews and Bettina Abendroth from the IAD's Human-Machine Interaction & Mobility research group presented the Human-Machine Interfaces of the CityBots developed and evaluated on the real CityBot vehicles in user studies in the project’s real lab Deutsche Bank Park, such as avatar display, the LED matrix and the internal people mover display for interaction between user groups such as pedestrians, passengers, working persons and the CityBots. Furthermore, the results of the development and evaluation of the CityBots control or operation center, consisting of the dispatcher and teleoperator workstations, were presented. By the project’s conclusion at the end of October, the evaluation of the user studies on interaction with the CityBots from both the user and operator perspectives will be completed, and design recommendations for optimizing the HMIs will be derived.

The IAD would like to thank the project consortium for the excellent, supportive collaboration, as well as the funding body BMDV and the project management agency BAV for the opportunity to develop and research the highly exciting CityBot concept as part of the funding program.

The Campus FreeCity project, funded by the Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport (BMDV), aimed to research solutions to the challenges of urban transport on a laboratory scale through the use of CityBot vehicles developed by project partner EDAG Engineering GmbH. Other partners include House of Logistics and Mobility (HOLM) GmbH, EintrachtTech GmbH, T-Systems International GmbH, COMPREDICT GmbH, DEKRA Automobil GmbH, University of Applied Sciences Fulda, Technical University of Darmstadt as well as FES, Mainova and DPD (associated). Further information can be found at https://www.campusfreecity.de/