Vehicle localization in highway tunnels is a challenging issue for autonomous vehicle navigation. Since GPS signals from satellites cannot be received inside a highway tunnel, map-aided localization is essential. However, the environment around the tunnel is composed mostly of an elliptical wall. Thereby, the unique feature points for map matching are few unlike the case outdoors. As a result, it is a very difficult condition to perform vehicle navigation in the tunnel with existing map-aided localization. In this paper, we propose tunnel facility-based precise vehicle localization in highway tunnels using 3D LIDAR. For vehicle localization in a highway tunnel, a point landmark map that stores the center points of tunnel facilities and a probability distribution map that stores the probability distributions of the lane markings are used. Point landmark-based localization is possible regardless of the number of feature points, if only representative points of an object can be extracted. Therefore, it is a suitable localization method for highway tunnels where the feature points are few. The tunnel facility points were extracted using 3D LIDAR. Position estimation is conducted using an EKF-based navigation filter. The proposed localization algorithm is verified through experiments using actual highway driving data. The experimental results verify that the tunnel facility-based vehicle localization yields precise results in real time.
Automated Digital Twin Construction for Highway Scenarios Using LiDAR Point Clouds and OpenStreetMap
Institute of Automotive Engineering, Graz University of Technology（格拉茨技术大学汽车工程研究所）；School of Intelligent Connected Vehicle, Hubei University of Automotive Technology（湖北汽车工业学院智能网联汽车学院）；Professorship of Autonomous Vehicle Systems, Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学自动驾驶系统教席）
Modeling the Lane-Change Reactions to Merging Vehicles for Highway On-Ramp Simulations
Global Center for Automotive Performance Simulation（全球汽车性能模拟中心）；Honda Research Institute, USA Inc.（美国本田研究所）；Virginia Tech Transportation Institute（弗吉尼亚理工大学交通研究所）
Neural-Geometric Tunnel Traversal: Localization-free UAV Flight with Tilted LiDARs
Centro Universitario de la Defensa, Zaragoza（萨拉戈萨国防大学中心）；Instituto de Investigación en Ingeniería de Aragón（阿拉贡工程研究院）；University of Zaragoza（萨拉戈萨大学）；Investigación en Ingeniería de Aragón（阿拉贡工程研究院）
Large-Scale Tunnel Air-Ground Collaboration With FLISP: Fast LiDAR-IMU Synchronized Path Planner
Shanghai Research Institute for Intelligent Autonomous Systems, Tongji University（同济大学上海自主智能无人系统科学中心）；State Key Laboratory of Autonomous Intelligent Unmanned Systems, Tongji University（同济大学自主智能无人系统全国重点实验室）；College of Electronic and Information Engineering, Tongji University（同济大学电子与信息工程学院）
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Toyota Motor North America Research and Development（丰田北美研发公司）
In the event of sensor failure, autonomous vehicles need to safely execute emergency maneuvers while avoiding other vehicles on the road. To accomplish this, the sensor-failed vehicle must predict the future semantic behaviors of other drivers, such as lane changes, as well as their future trajectories given a recent window of past sensor observations. We address the first issue of semantic behavior prediction in this paper, which is a precursor to trajectory prediction, by introducing a framework that leverages the power of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and graphical models. Our goal is to…
HiMo: High-Speed Objects Motion Compensation in Point Clouds
Division of Robotics, Perception, and Learning, KTH Royal Institute of Technology（机器人、感知与学习系，皇家理工学院）；Scania Group（斯堪尼亚集团）；Autonomous Transport Solutions Lab, Scania Group（自主运输解决方案实验室，斯堪尼亚集团）
We present a robust and precise localization system that achieves centimeter-level localization accuracy in disparate city scenes. Our system adaptively uses information from complementary sensors such as GNSS, LiDAR, and IMU to achieve high localization accuracy and resilience in challenging scenes, such as urban downtown, highways, and tunnels. Rather than relying only on LiDAR intensity or 3D geometry, we make innovative use of LiDAR intensity and altitude cues to significantly improve localization system accuracy and robustness. Our GNSS RTK module utilizes the help of the multi-sensor fus…
Australian Center for Field Robotics, the University of Sydney（悉尼大学澳大利亚野外机器人中心）
Centimeter level globally accurate and consistent maps for autonomous vehicles navigation has long been achieved by on board real-time kinematic(RTK)-GPS in open areas. However when dealing with urban environments, GPS will experience multipath and blockage in urban canyon, under bridges, inside tunnels and in underground environments. In this paper we present strategies to efficiently register local maps in geographical coordinate systems through the tactical integration of GPS and information extracted from precisely geo-referenced high resolution aerial orthogonal imagery. Dense lidar point…
We propose Super Odometry, a high-precision multi-modal sensor fusion framework, providing a simple but effective way to fuse multiple sensors such as LiDAR, camera, and IMU sensors and achieve robust state estimation in perceptually-degraded environments. Different from traditional sensor-fusion methods, Super Odometry employs an IMU-centric data processing pipeline, which combines the advantages of loosely coupled methods with tightly coupled methods and recovers motion in a coarse-to-fine manner. The proposed framework is composed of three parts: IMU odometry, visual-inertial odometry, and …
Uber Advanced Technologies Group（优步先进技术集团）；MIT（麻省理工学院）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）
In this paper we propose a novel semantic localization algorithm that exploits multiple sensors and has precision on the order of a few centimeters. Our approach does not require detailed knowledge about the appearance of the world, and our maps require orders of magnitude less storage than maps utilized by traditional geometry- and LiDAR intensity-based localizers. This is important as self-driving cars need to operate in large environments. Towards this goal, we formulate the problem in a Bayesian filtering framework, and exploit lanes, traffic signs, as well as vehicle dynamics to localize …
Lidar data can be used to generate point clouds for the navigation of autonomous vehicles or mobile robotics platforms. Scan matching, the process of estimating the rigid transformation that best aligns two point clouds, is the basis for lidar odometry, a form of dead reckoning. Lidar odometry is particularly useful when absolute sensors, like GPS, are not available. Here we propose the Iterative Closest Ellipsoidal Transform (ICET), a scan matching algorithm which provides two novel improvements over the current state-of-the-art Normal Distributions Transform (NDT). Like NDT, ICET decomposes …
We focus on the task of far-field 3D detection (Far3Det) of objects beyond a certain distance from an observer, e.g., $>$50m. Far3Det is particularly important for autonomous vehicles (AVs) operating at highway speeds, which require detections of far-field obstacles to ensure sufficient braking distances. However, contemporary AV benchmarks such as nuScenes underemphasize this problem because they evaluate performance only up to a certain distance (50m). One reason is that obtaining far-field 3D annotations is difficult, particularly for lidar sensors that produce very few point returns for fa…
Cross-Session 3D LiDAR and Camera Fusion for Robust Localization of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in GPS-Denied Environments
School of Electrical and Data Engineering, University of Technology Sydney（悉尼大学电气与数据工程学院）；Institute of Aerospace Engineering and Technology, Duy Tan University（杜益大学航空航天工程与技术学院）；College of Engineering and Computer Science, VinUniversity（Vin大学工程与计算机科学学院）；Smart Green Transformation Center (GREEN-X), VinUniversity（Vin大学智能绿色转型中心 (GREEN-X)）；Department of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Sejong University（成均馆大学人工智能与机器人系）
WOLF: World Model Guided LiDAR Exploration with Predictive Frontiers
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；East China University of Science and Technology（华东理工大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；TeleAI
Korea University（高丽大学）；Mofl Inc.（Mofl 公司）；Hallym University（翰林大学）；California State University, Long Beach（加州州立大学长滩分校）
Self-driving cars and autonomous driving research has been receiving considerable attention as major promising prospects in modern artificial intelligence applications. According to the evolution of advanced driver assistance system (ADAS), the design of self-driving vehicle and autonomous driving systems becomes complicated and safety-critical. In general, the intelligent system simultaneously and efficiently activates ADAS functions. Therefore, it is essential to consider reliable ADAS function coordination to control the driving system, safely. In order to deal with this issue, this paper p…
Ultra-Fusion: A Resilient Tightly-Coupled Multi-Sensor Fusion SLAM Framework under Sensor Degradation and Spatiotemporal Perturbation for Intelligent Transportation Systems
Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Chongqing University（重庆大学）；Sichuan University（四川大学）；Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
Mapping and localization is a critical module of autonomous driving, and significant achievements have been reached in this field. Beyond Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), research in point cloud registration, visual feature matching, and inertia navigation has greatly enhanced the accuracy and robustness of mapping and localization in different scenarios. However, highly urbanized scenes are still challenging: LIDAR- and camera-based methods perform poorly with numerous dynamic objects; the GNSS-based solutions experience signal loss and multipath problems; the inertia measurement un…
The automatic road roller, as a popular type of construction robot, has attracted much interest from both the industry and the research community in recent years. However, when it comes to tunnels where the degeneration issues are prone to happen, it is still a challenging problem to provide an accurate positioning result for the robot. In this paper, we aim to deal with this problem by fusing LiDAR and UWB measurements based on optimization. In the proposed localization method, the directions of non-degeneration will be constrained and the covariance of UWB reconstruction will be introduced t…
Boosting LiDAR-Based Localization with Semantic Insight: Camera Projection versus Direct LiDAR Segmentation
Department of Technical Cognitive Systems, FZI Research Center for Information Technology（技术认知系统部门，信息技术研究所以暨创新中心）；Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)（卡尔斯鲁厄大学）
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Institute for Infocomm Research, A-STAR（新加坡科技研究局资讯通信研究院）
Localization can be achieved by different sensors and techniques such as a global positioning system (GPS), wifi, ultrasonic sensors, and cameras. In this paper, we focus on the laser-based localization method for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) applications in a GPS denied environment such as a deep tunnel system. Other than a low-cost 2D LiDAR for the planar axes, a single axis Lidar for the vertical axis as well as an inertial measurement unit (IMU) device is used to increase the reliability and accuracy of the localization performance. We present a comparative analysis of the three selected …
MINES ParisTech, PSL University, Centre for Robotics（巴黎高科矿业学院，巴黎文理研究大学，机器人中心）
KITTI-CARLA is a dataset built from the CARLA v0.9.10 simulator using a vehicle with sensors identical to the KITTI dataset. The vehicle thus has a Velodyne HDL64 LiDAR positioned in the middle of the roof and two color cameras similar to Point Grey Flea 2. The positions of the LiDAR and cameras are the same as the setup used in KITTI. The objective of this dataset is to test approaches of semantic segmentation LiDAR and/or images, odometry LiDAR and/or image in synthetic data and to compare with the results obtained on real data like KITTI. This dataset thus makes it possible to improve trans…
Technische Hochschule Ingolstadt（因戈尔施塔特应用技术大学）；GeneSys Elektronik GmbH（GeneSys电子有限公司）；University of Castilla-La Mancha（卡斯蒂利亚-拉曼恰大学）
Autonomous driving is an important trend of the automotive industry. The continuous research towards this goal requires a precise reference vehicle state estimation under all circumstances in order to develop and test autonomous vehicle functions. However, even when lane-accurate positioning is expected from oncoming technologies, like the L5 GPS band, the question of accurate positioning in roofed areas, e.\,g., tunnels or park houses, still has to be addressed. In this paper, a novel procedure for a reference vehicle state estimation is presented. The procedure includes three main components…
Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学机器人研究所）
Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is a fundamental task to mobile and aerial robotics. LiDAR based systems have proven to be superior compared to vision based systems due to its accuracy and robustness. In spite of its superiority, pure LiDAR based systems fail in certain degenerate cases like traveling through a tunnel. We propose Stereo Visual Inertial LiDAR (VIL) SLAM that performs better on these degenerate cases and has comparable performance on all other cases. VIL-SLAM accomplishes this by incorporating tightly-coupled stereo visual inertial odometry (VIO) with LiDAR mapping …
Reliable and accurate localization and mapping are key components of most autonomous systems. Besides geometric information about the mapped environment, the semantics plays an important role to enable intelligent navigation behaviors. In most realistic environments, this task is particularly complicated due to dynamics caused by moving objects, which can corrupt the mapping step or derail localization. In this paper, we propose an extension of a recently published surfel-based mapping approach exploiting three-dimensional laser range scans by integrating semantic information to facilitate the…
In this paper, we present SROM, a novel real-time Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) system for autonomous vehicles. The keynote of the paper showcases SROM's ability to maintain localization at low sampling rates or at high linear or angular velocities where most popular LiDAR based localization approaches get degraded fast. We also demonstrate SROM to be computationally efficient and capable of handling high-speed maneuvers. It also achieves low drifts without the need for any other sensors like IMU and/or GPS. Our method has a two-layer structure wherein first, an approximate esti…
In this paper, we present a global navigation satellite system (GNSS) aided LiDAR-visual-inertial scheme, RailLoMer-V, for accurate and robust rail vehicle localization and mapping. RailLoMer-V is formulated atop a factor graph and consists of two subsystems: an odometer assisted LiDAR-inertial system (OLIS) and an odometer integrated Visual-inertial system (OVIS). Both the subsystem exploits the typical geometry structure on the railroads. The plane constraints from extracted rail tracks are used to complement the rotation and vertical errors in OLIS. Besides, the line features and vanishing …
A Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) system must be robust to support long-term mobile vehicle and robot applications. However, camera and LiDAR based SLAM systems can be fragile when facing challenging illumination or weather conditions which degrade their imagery and point cloud data. Radar, whose operating electromagnetic spectrum is less affected by environmental changes, is promising although its distinct sensing geometry and noise characteristics bring open challenges when being exploited for SLAM. % However, there are still open challenges since most existing visual and LiDAR …
LiDAR-based localization and mapping is one of the core components in many modern robotic systems due to the direct integration of range and geometry, allowing for precise motion estimation and generation of high quality maps in real-time. Yet, as a consequence of insufficient environmental constraints present in the scene, this dependence on geometry can result in localization failure, happening in self-symmetric surroundings such as tunnels. This work addresses precisely this issue by proposing a neural network-based estimation approach for detecting (non-)localizability during robot operati…
In this paper, we present a novel algorithm for point cloud registration for range sensors capable of measuring per-return instantaneous radial velocity: Doppler ICP. Existing variants of ICP that solely rely on geometry or other features generally fail to estimate the motion of the sensor correctly in scenarios that have non-distinctive features and/or repetitive geometric structures such as hallways, tunnels, highways, and bridges. We propose a new Doppler velocity objective function that exploits the compatibility of each point's Doppler measurement and the sensor's current motion estimate.…
QUT Centre for Robotics（昆士兰科技大学机器人中心）；Mining3；CSIRO Mineral Resources（澳大利亚联邦科学与工业研究组织矿产资源部）
Surface cracks on buildings, natural walls and underground mine tunnels can indicate serious structural integrity issues that threaten the safety of the structure and people in the environment. Timely detection and monitoring of cracks are crucial to managing these risks, especially if the systems can be made highly automated through robots. Vision-based crack detection algorithms using deep neural networks have exhibited promise for structured surfaces such as walls or civil engineering tunnels, but little work has addressed highly unstructured environments such as rock cliffs and bare mining…
