Autonomous vehicles (AV) are expected to improve, reshape, and revolutionize the future of ground transportation. It is anticipated that ordinary vehicles will one day be replaced with smart vehicles that are able to make decisions and perform driving tasks on their own. In order to achieve this objective, self-driving vehicles are equipped with sensors that are used to sense and perceive both their surroundings and the faraway environment, using further advances in communication technologies, such as 5G. In the meantime, local perception, as with human beings, will continue to be an effective means for controlling the vehicle at short range. In the other hand, extended perception allows for anticipation of distant events and produces smarter behavior to guide the vehicle to its destination while respecting a set of criteria (safety, energy management, traffic optimization, comfort). In spite of the remarkable advancements of sensor technologies in terms of their effectiveness and applicability for AV systems in recent years, sensors can still fail because of noise, ambient conditions, or manufacturing defects, among other factors; hence, it is not advisable to rely on a single sensor for any of the autonomous driving tasks. The practical solution is to incorporate multiple competitive and complementary sensors that work synergistically to overcome their individual shortcomings. This article provides a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art methods utilized to improve the performance of AV systems in short-range or local vehicle environments. Specifically, it focuses on recent studies that use deep learning sensor fusion algorithms for perception, localization, and mapping. The article concludes by highlighting some of the current trends and possible future research directions.
A new fuzzy-based potential field method is presented in this paper for autonomous mobile robot motion planning with dynamic environments including static or moving target and obstacles. Two fuzzy Mamdani and TSK models have been used to develop the total attractive and repulsive forces acting on the mobile robot. The attractive and repulsive forces were estimated using four inputs representing the relative position and velocity between the target and the robot in the x and y directions, in one hand, and between the obstacle and the robot, on the other hand. The proposed fuzzy potential field motion planning was investigated based on several conducted MATLAB simulation scenarios for robot motion planning within realistic dynamic environments. As it was noticed from these simulations that the proposed approach was able to provide the robot with collision-free path to softly land on the moving target and solve the local minimum problem within any stationary or dynamic environment compared to other potential field-based approaches.
Achieving precise state estimation is needed for the unmanned aerial vehicle to perform a successful flight with a high degree of stability. Nonetheless, obtaining accurate state estimation is considered challenging due to the inaccuracies associated with the measurements of the onboard commercial-offthe-shelf (COTS) Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU). The immense vibration of the vehicle's rotors makes these measurements suffer from issues like; large drifts, biases and immense unpredictable noise sequences. These issues cannot be significantly tackled using classical estimators and an accurate sensor fusion technique needs to be developed. In this paper, a deep learning framework is developed to enhance the performance of the state estimator. A deep neural network (DNN) is trained using a deep-learning-based technique to identify the associated measurement noise models and filter them out. Dropout technique is adopted for training the DNN to avoid overfitting and reduce the complexity of nets computations. Compared to the classical estimation results, the proposed deep learning technique demonstrates capabilities in identifying the measurement's noise characteristics. As an example, an enhancement in estimating the attitude states at near hover is proved using this approach. Furthermore, an actual hover flight was performed to validate the proposed estimation enhancement method.
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