Meet us at Vehicle Tech Week Europe 2026
We'll be at Automotive Testing Expo Europe in Stuttgart from 23 to 25 June 2026, part of this year's Vehicle Tech Week. You'll find our stand in the Academia Lounge (Hall 1, Booth 1292), and our Lexus RX450h will be running a live vehicle-in-the-loop test drive in the outdoor demo area by Gate 10.
Our main demo: vehicle-in-the-loop
In vehicle-in-the-loop (ViL) testing, the car drives for real on a closed course while perceiving a simulated world. Perception, planning, and control all run on the actual vehicle, but the traffic, pedestrians, and road it reacts to come from our CARLA digital twin of Tartu.
This combines two things that are usually hard to get at the same time — real vehicle dynamics and full freedom over the scenario:
| Real vehicle dynamics | Any scenario | |
|---|---|---|
| Pure simulation | No | Yes |
| Proving ground | Yes | Limited |
| Vehicle-in-the-loop | Yes | Yes |
Pure simulation can build any scenario but can't reproduce real braking distances, accelerations, and tire–road interaction. A proving ground gives you the real dynamics, but staging varied scenarios there is slow and costly. Vehicle-in-the-loop keeps the real dynamics of the car while placing it in any simulated traffic and conditions, which we build with our Visual Scenario Editor for CARLA.
The Tartu living lab
Behind the demo is our living lab in Tartu: a city-scale testbed, continuously validated by our self-driving car, which we run in public-street testing every week. As far as we know, it's the largest living lab operated by an academic institution.
The living lab brings together everything you'd rely on: a 40 km² CARLA digital twin of Tartu, a real autonomous vehicle running our open-source software (Autoware Mini), a lane-level HD map of every bus route, and machine-readable traffic lights that broadcast their state even in poor weather, plus remote assistance and teleoperation. And because Estonia has four seasons, you can test in snow, ice, and low light — conditions many sites can't offer.
Where to find us
Come see the car and the demo, and talk with our team about autonomous driving in Tartu. To set up a time in advance, write to adl@ut.ee.