Schaeffler Technologies AG & Co. KG

Achieving great things together: Partnership with RIEDEL Networks to realize a driverless racing car

Daniel Kohl

Daniel Kohl

Head of Technical Development

The Schaeffler Group is a leading international supplier based in Germany with over 70 years of experience. The company stands for innovation and technological excellence and develops solutions for CO₂-efficient drives, electric mobility, digitalization and renewable energies. With a clear focus on sustainability and a global presence, Schaeffler is driving the transformation of mobility and rapidly putting new technologies into practice - including in motorsport. Through close cooperation with partners from industry and research as well as continuous investment in development and digitalization, Schaeffler is constantly setting new standards for quality, efficiency and future-proof solutions throughout the industry.

High speed meets high tech

How RIEDEL Networks and Schaeffler made a driverless race possible

In 2012, Felix Baumgartner ascends in a helium balloon over the plains of New Mexico, USA, to an altitude of 39 kilometers to jump from the stratosphere towards the ground. With this jump, from the edge of space, he sets a new world record in free fall and is the first person to break the sound barrier without any motorized propulsion.

In many ways, this spectacular feat is similar to another remarkable feat: an electric racing car completing a lap of the DTM Electric Remote Run without a pilot in the cockpit. With one major difference: Felix Baumgartner's parachute jump took three years to prepare. Our project only had five months. Would that be enough?

A company that drives innovation

Based in Germany, the Schaeffler Group is a leading global automotive and industrial supplier pioneering carbon efficiency, electric mobility, digitalization and renewable energies. The Schaeffler Group has been driving forward innovations and developments in the fields of motion and mobility for over 70 years. With innovative technologies, products and services for CO₂-efficient drives, electric mobility, Industry 4.0, digitalization and renewable energies, the company is a reliable partner for making movement and mobility more efficient, intelligent and sustainable.

As Head of Technical Development Motorsport, it is my job to transfer the systems developed by Schaeffler to motorsport. Our focus here is primarily on electrified drive systems. These are already familiar from Formula E, the first all-electric racing series of the Federation Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA). In collaboration with Audi, we developed the electric motor, the inverter and parts of the transmission.

In 2019, we held the first talks with ITR, the umbrella organization of the German Touring Car Masters (DTM), about electrifying the racing series. At the end of 2020, we then presented the DTM Electric Democar at the DTM season finale in Hockenheim, a 1,200 hp fully electric demo car in which each wheel was powered by an electric motor from Formula E.

That was already very impressive, but of course we wanted more. At Schaeffler, we want to develop a fully electric racing car by 2023. We were able to use the DTM Electric Democar as a testing ground for new technologies, in particular Schaeffler's drive-by-wire system. With drive-by-wire technology, the brakes, steering and transmission are controlled by electronic systems instead of cable pull or hydraulic pressure.

Drive-by-wire technology has enormous future potential in the market, so we thought about how we could modify the vehicle handling to use drive-by-wire technology on a broader basis. What we had was an electric drive and a steer-by-wire system, but we could not yet control the brakes "by wire", i.e. electrically. To do this, we had to install actuators and redesign the entire software and topology of our system. Once that was done, we were able to control the car remotely.

The search for committed partners who shared our vision

"When trying to make the impossible possible, the biggest hurdle is finding the right partners who share an enthusiasm and vision for the project."

The entire setup was new. We took all the previous systems, expanded them and added new elements such as a camera stream from the vehicle. The car had to be equipped with drive-by-wire technology and we needed a driving simulator to control it remotely and provide the driver in the simulator with the appropriate feedback. To do this, we had to find a way to reliably transmit the signals between the vehicle and the simulator.

The technological issues were tricky, but the biggest hurdle was finding partners with the right skills to turn the individual parts into a big whole in just five months. The schedule was crazy and we needed a network partner who not only met the technical requirements, but would also be fully committed and provide all the resources to realize the project. This was not a standard network job, but a visionary future project where we wanted to create something that had never been done before.

This is where RIEDEL Networks came into the picture. The company had the technical know-how and saw the project as an opportunity to demonstrate its strengths in the best possible way. I had come across RIEDEL and its excellent reputation earlier in my racing career, so it was immediately clear that the company was exactly the right partner for the job.

Technical difficulties and environmental complications

We actually had to overcome three technological challenges. Firstly, we needed sufficient bandwidth to transmit the video and audio stream from the vehicle to the driving simulator. With this amount of data, that was a lot. The second issue was latency. All signals had to be transmitted in a fraction of a second. At such high racing speeds, a delay between the action on the racetrack and the driver's reaction in the simulator has serious consequences. The transmission must take place almost in real time. Otherwise, the vehicle can spin out of control. This problem leads to the third issue, namely the safety concerns associated with latency. Latency had to be extremely low throughout the race. If it were to exceed a certain threshold for just a moment, the vehicle would have to switch off automatically. Because nobody would know how long the latency would last.

Apart from the technical difficulties, the location of the race track also presented us with major challenges. The Red Bull Ring in Spielberg, Austria, is located in the eastern Alps. So we had to deal with high altitudes and mountain peaks that got in the way of the radio signals. There is also a large steel bull in the middle of the Red Bull Ring - radio signals don't necessarily like that either. There were also the many other racing teams, all working with their own radio networks, so we had to make sure that our frequency was not disturbed. And as if that wasn't enough, there's a military airport next door. Every time a fighter jet takes off, the activation of the systems can interfere with our radio network.

Finally, of course, we also needed a backup plan to ensure everyone's safety in the event of a network failure. In the worst-case scenario, we would have a two-tonne jet hurtling uncontrollably along the track at 200 km/h. A disaster. A catastrophe. So we had to come up with a plan B in case any of the components failed, from the simulator's power supply to the network and the drive-by-wire system. That was a lot of things in a very short space of time - something that could only be achieved with a highly qualified team.

New ideas and last-minute changes

Schaeffler took over the project management and overall responsibility for the project, especially for the vehicle and the drive-by-wire system. RIEDEL was responsible for network coverage and the secure provision of radio and data communication. To ensure a stable radio connection between the simulator and the vehicle at all times, we used a combination of two separate fiber optic connections and a 5G connection.

When we first started thinking about this project, the basic idea was to control the car remotely. But the further we delved into the project, the more it evolved. If we were going to control the car remotely, why not do it from further away? We decided not to control the car from a simulator in the pit lane, but to place the simulator 80 km away in Graz. However, this meant that we had to transmit the radio signal even further, with the same reaction time. Our aim was to transmit the data from the simulator to the vehicle and back to Graz in under a hundred milliseconds.

R's proposal: a wide area network with two primary fiber optic connections and a 5G backup. This increased costs, but we couldn't wait weeks for the results of a traditional evaluation process. So RIEDEL Networks suggested we bring Cisco on board as a sponsor for the additional network. Cisco agreed and we got the network extension from Spielberg to Graz with a latency of less than 10 milliseconds from the race car to the simulator and back to the car. For the driver, it made no difference whether he was remotely controlling the race car from the pit lane or from the simulator in Graz. The set-up was perfect and made the showcase even more exciting.

RIEDEL was excellent throughout the project, both in the design of the network and at the level of the individual team members. We had barely agreed on the administrative issues and division of responsibilities before they seconded people to our working group. They always delivered, at each of our weekly meetings. We could always count on their expertise, efficiency and reliability. Finding a partner with such a high level of professionalism and motivation is not easy.

Of course, that doesn't mean we didn't have problems to solve. On the morning of the test run, one of the mesh connections failed and the RIEDEL team had to go out on the track, find the cause of the fault (the fiber optic connection was interrupted) and gain access to a locked room in a crowded race facility - all within 30 minutes. That's what made this team so special: the certainty that we would solve all the problems. We were an excellent team - and without RIEDEL we would never have been able to complete the project in such a short time.

Making the impossible possible

When I stood next to the race track after all those months of hard work and our racing car sped past me at 180 km/h, I only really realized what we had achieved. If you bring the right people together and let them play to their strengths, you can achieve great things - even in a short space of time.

There were people who didn't believe we could develop a concept for the remote control of an electric racing car in such a short space of time. But we achieved much more than just a concept. We put the concept into practice, on a real race track, in a real race, with real people. On the day of the test run, I didn't watch our racing car on a screen, I saw it "live" with my own eyes.

"When you bring the right people together, you can achieve extraordinary things, even in a short time."

RIEDEL played a key role in enabling us to showcase our work with this project and position ourselves not just as a traditional supplier, but as a pioneer in the control and monitoring of complex systems. The whole project was only possible because Schaeffler was able to build on the support of reliable partners like RIEDEL. And that's not the end of the story. We are continuing to work intensively on the development of a fully electric racing car by 2023 and will also remain in close contact with RIEDEL about future projects. Who knows? Maybe we will be able to tell another great story one day.