For human drivers, having rear and side-view mirrors is vital for safe driving. They deliver a more complete view of what is happening around the car. Human drivers also heavily exploit their mental map for navigation. Nonetheless, several methods have been published that learn driving models with only a front-facing camera and without a route planner. This lack of information renders the self-driving task quite intractable. We investigate the problem in a more realistic setting, which consists of a surround-view camera system with eight cameras, a route planner, and a CAN bus reader. In particular, we develop a sensor setup that provides data for a 360-degree view of the area surrounding the vehicle, the driving route to the destination, and low-level driving maneuvers (e.g. steering angle and speed) by human drivers. With such a sensor setup we collect a new driving dataset, covering diverse driving scenarios and varying weather illumination conditions. Finally, we learn a novel driving model by integrating information from the surround-view cameras and the route planner. Two route planners are exploited: 1) by representing the planned routes on OpenStreetMap as a stack of GPS coordinates, and 2) by rendering the planned routes on TomTom Go Mobile and recording the progression into a video. Our experiments show that: 1) 360-degree surround-view cameras help avoid failures made with a single front-view camera, in particular for city driving and intersection scenarios; and 2) route planners help the driving task significantly, especially for steering angle prediction.
In-car navigation systems have been widely used to show the vehicle’s current location on a map and to inform drivers on how to get from the current position to the destination. Increasing the accuracy and robustness of systems for positioning, navigation and digital maps has been another research focus for many years. Several methods for high-definition mapping have been proposed @cite_59 @cite_64 , some specifically for autonomous driving @cite_80 @cite_27 . Route planning has been extensively studied as well @cite_47 @cite_19 @cite_21 @cite_44 @cite_2 , mainly to compute the fastest, most fuel-efficient, or a customized trajectory to the destination through a road network. Yet, thus far their usage is mostly restricted to help human drivers. Their accessibility as an aid to learn autonomous driving models has been limited. This work reports on two ways of using two kinds of maps: a s-o-t-a commercial map TomTom Maps https: www.tomtom.com en_us drive maps-services maps and the excellent collaborative project OpenStreetMaps @cite_82 .
@cite_64 @cite_21 @cite_44 @cite_19 @cite_27 @cite_59 @cite_2 @cite_80 @cite_47 @cite_82
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A fundamental problem in autonomous vehicle navigation is the identification of obstacle free space in cluttered and unstructured environments. Features such as walls, people, furniture, doors and stairs, etc are potential hazards. The approach taken in this paper is motivated by the recent development on infra-red time-of-flight cameras that provide video frame rate low resolution depth maps. We propose to exploit the temporal information content provided by the high refresh rate of such cameras to overcome the limitations due to low spatial resolution and high depth uncertainty and aim to provide robust and accurate estimates of planar surfaces in the environment. These surfaces' estimates are then used to provide statistical tests to identify obstacles and dangers in the environment. Classical 3D spatial RANSAC is extended to 4D spatio-temporal RANSAC by developing spatio-temporal models of planar surfaces that incorporate a linear motion model as well as linear environment features. A 4D-vector product is used for hypotheses generation from data that is randomly sampled across both spatial and temporal variations. The algorithm is fully posed in the spatio-temporal representation and there is no need to correlate points or hypothesis between temporal images. The proposed algorithm is computationally fast and robust for estimation of planar surfaces in general and the ground plane in particular. There are potential applications in mobile robotics, autonomous vehicular navigation, and automotive safety systems. The claims of the paper are supported by experimental results obtained from real video data for a time-of-flight range sensor mounted on an automobile navigating in an undercover parking lot. State-of-the-art autonomous driving systems rely heavily on detailed and highly accurate prior maps. However, outside of small urban areas, it is very challenging to build, store, and transmit detailed maps since the spatial scales are so large. Furthermore, maintaining detailed maps of large rural areas can be impracticable due to the rapid rate at which these environments can change. This is a significant limitation for the widespread applicability of autonomous driving technology, which has the potential for an incredibly positive societ al impact. In this paper, we address the problem of autonomous navigation in rural environments through a novel mapless driving framework that combines sparse topological maps for global navigation with a sensor-based perception system for local navigation. First, a local navigation goal within the sensor view of the vehicle is chosen as a waypoint leading towards the global goal. Next, the local perception system generates a feasible trajectory in the vehicle frame to reach the waypoint while abiding by the rules of the road for the segment being traversed. These trajectories are updated to remain in the local frame using the vehicle's odometry and the associated uncertainty based on the least-squares residual and a recursive filtering approach, which allows the vehicle to navigate road networks reliably, and at high speed, without detailed prior maps. We demonstrate the performance of the system on a full-scale autonomous vehicle navigating in a challenging rural environment and benchmark the system on a large amount of collected data. For human drivers, having rear and side-view mirrors is vital for safe driving. They deliver a more complete view of what is happening around the car. Human drivers also heavily exploit their mental map for navigation. Nonetheless, several methods have been published that learn driving models with only a front-facing camera and without a route planner. This lack of information renders the self-driving task quite intractable. We investigate the problem in a more realistic setting, which consists of a surround-view camera system with eight cameras, a route planner, and a CAN bus reader. In particular, we develop a sensor setup that provides data for a 360-degree view of the area surrounding the vehicle, the driving route to the destination, and low-level driving maneuvers (e.g. steering angle and speed) by human drivers. With such a sensor setup we collect a new driving dataset, covering diverse driving scenarios and varying weather illumination conditions. Finally, we learn a novel driving model by integrating information from the surround-view cameras and the route planner. Two route planners are exploited: (1) by representing the planned routes on OpenStreetMap as a stack of GPS coordinates, and (2) by rendering the planned routes on TomTom Go Mobile and recording the progression into a video. Our experiments show that: (1) 360-degree surround-view cameras help avoid failures made with a single front-view camera, in particular for city driving and intersection scenarios; and (2) route planners help the driving task significantly, especially for steering angle prediction. Code, data and more visual results will be made available at http: www.vision.ee.ethz.ch heckers Drive360. This paper presents a new real-time hierarchical (topological metric) simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) system. It can be applied to the robust localization of a vehicle in large-scale outdoor urban environments, improving the current vehicle navigation systems, most of which are only based on Global Positioning System (GPS). Then, it can be used on autonomous vehicle guidance with recurrent trajectories (bus journeys, theme park internal journeys, etc.). It is exclusively based on the information provided by both a low-cost, wide-angle stereo camera and a low-cost GPS. Our approach divides the whole map into local submaps identified by the so-called fingerprints (vehicle poses). In this submap level (low-level SLAM), a metric approach is carried out. There, a 3-D sequential mapping of visual natural landmarks and the vehicle location orientation are obtained using a top-down Bayesian method to model the dynamic behavior. GPS measurements are integrated within this low-level improving vehicle positioning. A higher topological level (high-level SLAM) based on fingerprints and the multilevel relaxation (MLR) algorithm has been added to reduce the global error within the map, keeping real-time constraints. This level provides nearly consistent estimation, keeping a small degradation with GPS unavailability. Some experimental results for large-scale outdoor urban environments are presented, showing an almost constant processing time.