We warmly congratulate Florian Jaumann, an employee at CARIAD SE and a doctoral researcher at the Research Unit for Technical Dynamics and Vehicle System Dynamics at the Institute for Mechanics and Mechatronics, on receiving a special recognition:

At the 29th IAVSD International Symposium on Dynamics of Vehicles on Roads and Tracks, held from 18–22 August 2025 at Tongji University in Shanghai, he was awarded the IAVSD Best Paper Award.

Ride comfort is tightly coupled to vehicle speed, in particular when traversing road obstacles such as speed bumps and road elevations. While human drivers typically choose their speed based on intuition and past experience, automated driving systems must rely on control algorithms to determine the appropriate speed and ensure a smooth ride.

Addressing this challenge, Florian presented a novel control approach that combines camera-based road preview with Reinforcement Learning (RL). A 3D reconstruction algorithm, based on a simple monocular camera available in many cars, estimates the upcoming road height trajectory, and an RL agent computes an acceleration trajectory to optimise ride comfort.

By integrating vehicle state information from a nonlinear vehicle model and incorporating uncertainties in road height estimation, the approach allows the learned speed controller to plan longitudinal motion without requiring exact knowledge of bump positions or dimensions. Results demonstrate that the RL agent effectively handles noisy preview information and achieves both vertical and longitudinal ride comfort, providing a robust solution for automated driving systems.