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Panacea: An Active Sensor Controller for the ALVINN Autonomous Driving System
R. Sukthankar, D. Pomerleau, and C. Thorpe
tech. report CMU-RI-TR-93-09, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, April, 1993.

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Panacea is a modular system which incorporates a steerable sensor into an existing neural network driving system, ALVINN. A fixed camera cannot see the road when it makes sharp bends. For a vision system the builds a map of the road, it is straightforward to point the camera down the road; but ALVINN directly outputs a steering command without generating an intermediate road representation. Insight from the training scheme used in ALVINN, however, provides an interpretation of the steering command in terms of the road geometry and appropriate camera pointing strategies. Tests on the Carnegie Mellon Navlab II with a steerable camera have shown that the system significantly improves ALVINN's performance, particularly in situations requiring sharp turns and quick responses.

Sponsor: DARPA
Grant ID: DACA76-89-C-0014, DAAE07-90-C-R059

Associated center: VASC
Associated lab/group: NavLab
Associated projects: Active Sensor Control for Neural Net Lane Tracking and Autonomous Land Vehicle In a Neural Network

Number of pages: 8

R. Sukthankar, D. Pomerleau, and C. Thorpe, Panacea: An Active Sensor Controller for the ALVINN Autonomous Driving System, tech. report CMU-RI-TR-93-09, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, April, 1993.

@techreport{Sukthankar_1993_300,
   author = "Rahul Sukthankar and Dean Pomerleau and Chuck Thorpe",
   title = "Panacea: An Active Sensor Controller for the ALVINN Autonomous Driving System",
   institution = "Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University",
   month = "April",
   year = "1993",
   number = "CMU-RI-TR-93-09",
   address = "Pittsburgh, PA"
}