Perception for driverless vehicles: design and implementation

Abstract

The development of driverless vehicles capable of moving on urban roads could pro- vide important benefits in accidents reductions, life comfort and costs reductions. In this document we discuss how to create a perception system allowing robots to drive on roads, without the need to adapt the infrastructure, without requiring previous visits, and considering possible the presence of pedestrians and cars. We argue that the perception process is application specific and by nature needs to be able to deal with uncertainties in the knowledge of the world. We analyse the particular problem of perception for safe driving in the urban environments and propose a novel solution where the perception process is essentially seen as an optimization process. Also we propose that the perception process could benefit from collaboration between nearby vehicles. We examine this problem and provide a solution adapted to the con- straints encountered in the urban scenario. Here the core issue is formulated as a data association problem. Both the new perception and collaboration mechanism were integrated into a full-fledged driverless vehicle system. The results are supported by real world full scale experiments on our automated electric vehicles, the Cycabs.