Autonomous driving in urban environments: Boss and the Urban Challenge

Abstract

Boss is an autonomous vehicle that uses on-board sensors (global positioning system, lasers, radars, and cameras) to track other vehicles, detect static obstacles, and localize itself relative to a road model. A three-layer planning system combines mission, behavioral, and motion planning to drive in urban environments. The mission planning layer considers which street to take to achieve a mission goal. The behavioral layer determines when to change lanes and precedence at intersections and performs error recovery maneuvers. The motion planning layer selects actions to avoid obstacles while making progress toward local goals. The system was developed from the ground up to address the requirements of the DARPA Urban Challenge using a spiral system development process with a heavy emphasis on regular, regressive system testing. During the National Qualification Event and the 85-km Urban Challenge Final Event, Boss demonstrated some of its capabilities, qualifying first and winning the challenge. C 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Credibilist SLAM performances with different laser set-ups

“…If major steps forward have been achieved over the last few years with demonstrations such as the DARPA Urban Challenge in 2007 [2], [3] or the VisLab PROUD car test in 2013 [4], locating a vehicle and mapping its environment in a urban context and with a reasonable set of sensors is still challenging.…”

A Real-Time Range Finding System with Binocular Stereo Vision

“…Different kinds of sensors can be used for this purpose, for example, laser range finder, radio direction and ranging (RADAR), sonar, video cameras, etc. Laser range finder and RADAR are usually used in land-based rovers for their high accuracy and large effective range [1] . Sonar is the first choice for underwater robots [2] , which is also widely used in ground robots for short range obstacle detection [3] .…”

Current trends in the development of intelligent unmanned autonomous systems

“…From 2004 to 2007, the American Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) organized three UV challenges, which promoted the rapid development of UV technologies (Bacha et al, 2008;Montemerlo et al, 2008;Urmson et al, 2008).…”