Towards urban driverless vehicles

Rodrigo Benenson (1) , Stéphane Petti (1) , Thierry Fraichard (2) , Michel Null Parent (1)

1 IMARA - Informatique, Mathématiques et Automatique pour la Route Automatisée
2 E-MOTION - Geometry and Probability for Motion and Action

The paper addresses the problem of autonomous navigation of a car-like robot evolving in an urban environment. Such an environment exhibits an heterogeneous geometry and is cluttered with moving obstacles. Furthermore, in this context, motion safety is a critical issue. The proposed approach to the problem lies in the design of perception and planning modules that consider explicitely the dynamic nature of the vehicle and the environment while enforcing the safety constraint. The main contributions of this work are the development of such modules and they integration into a single application. Initial full scale experiments validating the approach are presented.

Mots clés: Driverless car; Cybercars; Motion planning; Perception; NDT; SLAM; MOT; PMP

Domaines: Robotique [cs.RO]

Rodrigo Benenson, Stéphane Petti, Thierry Fraichard, Michel Null Parent. Towards urban driverless vehicles. International Journal of Vehicle Autonomous Systems, 2008, Special Issue on Advances in Autonomous Vehicle Technologies for Urban Environment, 1/2 (6), pp.4 - 23. ⟨inria-00115112v2⟩