This paper proposes an approach that predicts the road course from camera sensors leveraging deep learning techniques. Road pixels are identified by training a multi-scale convolutional neural network on a large number of full-scene-labeled nighttime road images including adverse weather conditions. A framework is presented that applies the proposed approach to longer distance road course estimation, which is the basis for an augmented reality navigation application. In this framework long range sensor data (radar) and data from a map database are fused with short range sensor data (camera) to produce a precise longitudinal and lateral localization and road course estimation. The proposed approach reliably detects roads with and without lane markings and thus increases the robustness and availability of road course estimations and augmented reality navigation. Evaluations on an extensive set of high precision ground truth data taken from a differential GPS and an inertial measurement unit show that the proposed approach reaches state-of-the-art performance without the limitation of requiring existing lane markings. This work was partially funded by the European Commission under the ECSEL Joint Undertaking in the scope of the DESERVE project. http://www.deserve-project.eu/ 1 M. Limmer, J. Forster, D. Baudach and R. Schweiger are with
Solar-powered aircraft promise significantly increased flight endurance over conventional aircraft. While this makes them promising candidates for large-scale aerial inspection missions, their structural fragility necessitates that adverse weather is avoided using appropriate path planning methods. This paper therefore presents MetPASS, the Meteorology-aware Path Planning and Analysis Software for Solar-powered UAVs. MetPASS is the first path planning framework in the literature that considers all aspects that influence the safety or performance of solar-powered flight: It avoids environmental risks (thunderstorms, rain, wind, wind gusts and humidity) and exploits advantageous regions (high sun radiation or tailwind). It also avoids system risks such as low battery state of charge and returns safe paths through cluttered terrain. MetPASS imports weather data from global meteorological models, propagates the aircraft state through an energetic system model, and then combines both into a cost function. A combination of dynamic programming techniques and an A*-search-algorithm with a custom heuristic is leveraged to plan globally optimal paths in station-keeping, point-to-point or multi-goal aerial inspection missions with coverage guarantees. A full software implementation including a GUI is provided. The planning methods are verified using three missions of ETH Zurich's AtlantikSolar UAV: An 81-hour continuous solar-powered station-keeping flight, a 4000 km Atlantic crossing from Newfoundland to Portugal, and two multi-glacier aerial inspection missions above the Arctic Ocean performed near Greenland in summer 2017. It is shown that integrating meteorological data has significant advantages and is indispensable for the reliable execution of large-scale solar-powered aircraft missions. For example, the correct selection of launch date and flight path across the Atlantic Ocean decreases the required flight time from 106 hours to only 52 hours.
We present a novel hierarchical POMDP framework to solve an object search and delivery task where the agent is given a prior belief about the possible item locations. Solving POMDPs is computationally demanding and, as such, applications have typically been limited to small environments. The proposed hierarchical POMDP framework performs reasoning on multiple spatial scales in order to reduce computation time. The problem is first solved in the top layer of the hierarchy with a coarsely discretized state space. Its solution is refined in the lower layers with increasing resolution. Three different methods for propagating information down the spatial hierarchy are discussed and validated in simulation. We show that a twolayer multi-scale POMDP decreases computation time by an order of magnitude allowing for real-time applications while maintaining high solution quality. For large problems that require three layers to reach the desired resolution, computation time speedups by two orders of magnitude are achieved.
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