As autonomous cars are rolled out into new environments, their ability to solve the simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) problem becomes critical. In order to tackle this problem, autonomous vehicles rely on sensor suites that provide them with information about their operating environment. When large scale production is taken into consideration, a trade-off between an acceptable sensor suite cost and its resulting performance characteristics arises. Furthermore, guaranteeing the system's performance requires a resilient sensor network design. This work seeks to address such trade-offs by introducing a method that takes into account the performance, cost, and resiliency of distinct sensor selections. As a result, this method is able to offer sensor combination recommendations based on the vehicle's operating environment. It is found that the structure of the environment influences sensor placement, and that the design of a resilient sensor network involves careful consideration of both environmental attributes such as landmark density and location, as well as the available types of complimentary sensors. Demonstration of the proposed approach is shown by evaluating it using sequences from the KITTI Benchmark Suite.
Amongst the most important metrics to consider when choosing an appropriate set of sensors with which to outfit an autonomous vehicle are performance @cite_7 , reliability @cite_8 , and cost @cite_16 . The quality of the SLAM solution has a direct impact on the behavior of the car, since its output is utilized by the planning and control module for essential guidance tasks @cite_7 . In addition to preserving the warranted performance requirements, the sensor suite of choice must be resilient; it needs to guarantee safe operations in new and unknown environments @cite_13 , as well as robustness against hardware failures and loss of measurements (e.g., unavailable GPS information in certain urban settings) @cite_20 . Moreover, for autonomous cars to become a viable solution, they need to satisfactorily reach the aforementioned system-level performance while maintaining competitive costs in order to successfully rival traditional alternative transportation systems (e.g., private autos, public transportation) @cite_23 @cite_0 .
@cite_7 @cite_8 @cite_0 @cite_23 @cite_16 @cite_13 @cite_20
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For robotic systems to realise lifelong autonomy they must be able to navigate accurately in changing environments. In this thesis we describe, implement and validate a new approach to the problem of long-term navigation. To begin, we present our stereo visual odometry system which provides highly accurate pose estimation. Our approach combines several techniques found in existing implementations and a recently published image descriptor that simplifies the solution architecture. The performance and versatility of our system is demonstrated through testing on multiple datasets. Equipped with our visual odometry system, we describe a new approach to the problem of lifelong navigation. We learn a model whose complexity varies naturally in accordance with the variation of scene appearance. As the robot repeatedly traverses its workspace, it accumulates distinct visual experiences that, in concert, implicitly represent the scene variation - each experience captures a visual mode. When operating in a previously visited area, we continually try to localise in these previous experiences while simultaneously running the visual odometry. Failure to localise in a sufficient number of prior experiences indicates an insufficient model of the workspace and instigates the laying down of the live image sequence as a new distinct experience. In this way, over time we can capture the typical temporally varying appearance of an environment and the number of experiences required tends to a constant. Although we focus on vision as a primary sensor, the ideas we present here are equally applicable to other sensor modalities. We demonstrate our approach working on a road vehicle operating over a three month period at different times of day, in different weather and lighting conditions. Recent advances in vehicular communications make it possible to realize vehicular sensor networks, i.e., collaborative environments where mobile vehicles that are equipped with sensors of different nature (from toxic detectors to still video cameras) interwork to implement monitoring applications. In particular, there is an increasing interest in proactive urban monitoring, where vehicles continuously sense events from urban streets, autonomously process sensed data (e.g., recognizing license plates), and, possibly, route messages to vehicles in their vicinity to achieve a common goal (e.g., to allow police agents to track the movements of specified cars). This challenging environment requires novel solutions with respect to those of more-traditional wireless sensor nodes. In fact, unlike conventional sensor nodes, vehicles exhibit constrained mobility, have no strict limits on processing power and storage capabilities, and host sensors that may generate sheer amounts of data, thus making already-known solutions for sensor network data reporting inapplicable. This paper describes MobEyes, which is an effective middleware that was specifically designed for proactive urban monitoring and exploits node mobility to opportunistically diffuse sensed data summaries among neighbor vehicles and to create a low-cost index to query monitoring data. We have thoroughly validated the original MobEyes protocols and demonstrated their effectiveness in terms of indexing completeness, harvesting time, and overhead. In particular, this paper includes (1) analytic models for MobEyes protocol performance and their consistency with simulation-based results, (2) evaluation of performance as a function of vehicle mobility, (3) effects of concurrent exploitation of multiple harvesting agents with single multihop communications, (4) evaluation of network overhead and overall system stability, and (5) performance validation of MobEyes in a challenging urban tracking application where the police reconstruct the movements of a suspicious driver, e.g., by specifying the license number of a car. 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. Accurate and robust tracking of surrounding road participants plays an important role in autonomous driving. However, there is usually no prior knowledge of the number of tracking targets due to object emergence, object disappearance and false alarms. To overcome this challenge, we propose a generic vehicle tracking framework based on modified mixture particle filter, which can make the number of tracking targets adaptive to real-time observations and track all the vehicles within sensor range simultaneously in a uniform architecture without explicit data association. Each object corresponds to a mixture component whose distribution is non-parametric and approximated by particle hypotheses. Most tracking approaches employ vehicle kinematic models as the prediction model. However, it is hard for these models to make proper predictions when sensor measurements are lost or become low quality due to partial or complete occlusions. Moreover, these models are incapable of forecasting sudden maneuvers. To address these problems, we propose to incorporate learning-based behavioral models instead of pure vehicle kinematic models to realize prediction in the prior update of recursive Bayesian state estimation. Two typical driving scenarios including lane keeping and lane change are demonstrated to verify the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed framework as well as the advantages of employing learning-based models.