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.
@cite_7: This paper presents a functional system architecture for an automated vehicle. It provides an overall, generic structure that is independent of a specific implementation of a particular vehicle project. Yet, it has been inspired and cross-checked with a real world automated driving implementation in the Stadtpilot project at the Technische Universitat Braunschweig. The architecture entails aspects like environment and self perception, planning and control, localization, map provision, Vehicle-To-X-communication, and interaction with human operators.
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@cite_23: Vehicle automation and its adoption by the vehicle purchasers is an active area of research among transportation academics. So far, most of the interest in the adoption of fully automated, driverless vehicles has focussed on private vehicles alone, yet full automation could be beneficial for commercial vehicles too. This paper identifies the vehicle sectors that will likely be the earliest adopters of full automation. Total cost of ownership analysis is used to compare the costs (and benefits) of vehicle automation for private vehicles among different income groups and commercial vehicles in the taxi and freight sectors in the UK. Commercial operations clearly benefit more from automation because the driver costs can be reduced substantially through automation. Among private users, households with the highest income will benefit more from automation because of their higher driving distances and higher perceived value of time, which can be used more productively through full automation.
@cite_16: Fast advances in autonomous driving technology trigger the question of suitable operational models for future autonomous vehicles. A key determinant of such operational models’ viability is the competitiveness of their cost structures. Using a comprehensive analysis of the respective cost structures, this research shows that public transportation (in its current form) will only remain economically competitive where demand can be bundled to larger units. In particular, this applies to dense urban areas, where public transportation can be offered at lower prices than autonomous taxis (even if pooled) and private cars. Wherever substantial bundling is not possible, shared and pooled vehicles serve travel demand more efficiently. Yet, in contrast to current wisdom, shared fleets may not be the most efficient alternative. Higher costs and more effort for vehicle cleaning could change the equation. Moreover, the results suggest that a substantial share of vehicles may remain in private possession and use due to their low variable costs. Even more than today, high fixed costs of private vehicles will continue to be accepted, given the various benefits of a private mobility robot.
@cite_13: 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.
@cite_20: This paper presents a Monte Carlo localization algorithm for an autonomous car based on an integration of multiple sensors data. The sensor system is composed of onboard motion sensors, a low-cost GPS receiver, a precise digital map, and multiple cameras. Data from the onboard motion sensors, such as yaw rate and wheel speeds, are used to predict the vehicle motion, and the GPS receiver is applied to establish the validation boundary of the ego–vehicle position. The digital map contains location information at the centimeter level about road surface markers (RSMs), such as lane markers, stop lines, and traffic sign markers. The multiple images from the front and rear mono-cameras and the around-view monitoring system are used to detect the RSM features. The localization algorithm updates the measurements by matching the RSM features from the cameras to the digital map based on a particle filter. Because the particle filter updates the measurements based on a probabilistic sensor model, the exact probabilistic modeling of sensor noise is a key factor to enhance the localization performance. To design the probabilistic noise model of the RSM features more explicitly, we analyze the results of the RSM feature detection for various real driving conditions. The proposed localization algorithm is verified and evaluated through experiments under various test scenarios and configurations. From the experimental results, we conclude that the presented localization algorithm based on the probabilistic noise model of RSM features provides sufficient accuracy and reliability for autonomous driving system applications.
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 .