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Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute

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Abstract

Intelligent vehicles are beginning to appear on the market, but so far their sensing and warning functions only work on the open road. Functions such as run-off-road warning or adaptive cruise control are de-signed for the uncluttered environments of open high-ways.

We are working on the much more difficult problem of sensing and driver interfaces for driving in urban ar-eas. We need to sense cars and pedestrians and curbs and fire plugs and bicycles and lamp posts; we need to predict the paths of our own vehicle and of other moving objects; and we need to decide when to issue alerts or warnings to both the driver of our own vehi-cle and (potentially) to nearby pedestrians.

No single sensor is currently able to detect and track all relevant objects. We are working with radar, ladar, stereo vision, and a novel light-stripe range sensor. We have installed a subset of these sen-sors on a city bus, driving through the streets of Pitts-burgh on its normal runs. We are using different kinds of data fusion for different subsets of sensors, plus a coordinating framework for mapping objects at an abstract level.

Notes

Associated Center(s) / Consortia: Vision and Autonomous Systems Center and Field Robotics Center

Associated Lab(s) / Group(s): NavLab

Associated Project(s): Tactical Mobile Robotics, Simultaneous Localization and Mapping with Detection, Tracking, and Classification of Moving Objects, Side Collision Warning System for Transit Buses, CTA Robotics

Text Reference

Chuck Thorpe, David Duggins, Jay Gowdy, Robert MacLachlan, Christoph Mertz, Mel Siegel, Arne Suppe, Chieh-Chih Wang, and Teruko Yata, "Driving in Traffic: Short-Range Sensing for Urban Collision Avoidance," Proceedings of SPIE: Unmanned Ground Vehicle Technology IV, April, 2002.

BibTeX Reference

@inproceedings{Thorpe_2002_3946,
   author = "Chuck Thorpe and David Duggins and Jay Gowdy and Robert MacLachlan and Christoph Mertz and Mel Siegel and Arne Suppe and Chieh-Chih Wang and Teruko Yata",
   title = "Driving in Traffic: Short-Range Sensing for Urban Collision Avoidance",
   booktitle = "Proceedings of SPIE: Unmanned Ground Vehicle Technology IV",
   month = "April",
   year = "2002",
   volume = "4715",
}

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