18,254 research outputs found
A mosaic of eyes
Autonomous navigation is a traditional research topic in intelligent robotics and vehicles, which requires a robot to perceive its environment through onboard sensors such as cameras or laser scanners, to enable it to drive to its goal. Most research to date has focused on the development of a large and smart brain to gain autonomous capability for robots. There are three fundamental questions to be answered by an autonomous mobile robot: 1) Where am I going? 2) Where am I? and 3) How do I get there? To answer these basic questions, a robot requires a massive spatial memory and considerable computational resources to accomplish perception, localization, path planning, and control. It is not yet possible to deliver the centralized intelligence required for our real-life applications, such as autonomous ground vehicles and wheelchairs in care centers. In fact, most autonomous robots try to mimic how humans navigate, interpreting images taken by cameras and then taking decisions accordingly. They may encounter the following difficulties
An Efficient Monte Carlo-based Probabilistic Time-Dependent Routing Calculation Targeting a Server-Side Car Navigation System
Incorporating speed probability distribution to the computation of the route
planning in car navigation systems guarantees more accurate and precise
responses. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for dynamically selecting
the number of samples used for the Monte Carlo simulation to solve the
Probabilistic Time-Dependent Routing (PTDR) problem, thus improving the
computation efficiency. The proposed method is used to determine in a proactive
manner the number of simulations to be done to extract the travel-time
estimation for each specific request while respecting an error threshold as
output quality level. The methodology requires a reduced effort on the
application development side. We adopted an aspect-oriented programming
language (LARA) together with a flexible dynamic autotuning library (mARGOt)
respectively to instrument the code and to take tuning decisions on the number
of samples improving the execution efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate
that the proposed adaptive approach saves a large fraction of simulations
(between 36% and 81%) with respect to a static approach while considering
different traffic situations, paths and error requirements. Given the
negligible runtime overhead of the proposed approach, it results in an
execution-time speedup between 1.5x and 5.1x. This speedup is reflected at
infrastructure-level in terms of a reduction of around 36% of the computing
resources needed to support the whole navigation pipeline
Feasibility of expanding traffic monitoring systems with floating car data technology
Trajectory information reported by certain vehicles (Floating Car Data or FCD) can be applied to monitor the road network. Policy makers face difficulties when deciding to invest in the expansion of their infrastructure based on inductive loops and cameras, or to invest in a FCD system. This paper targets this decision. The provided FCD functionality is investigated, minimum requirements are determined and reliability issues are researched. The communication cost is derived and combined with other elements to assess the total costs for different scenarios. The outcome is to target a penetration rate of 1%, a sample interval of 10 seconds and a transmission interval of 30 seconds. Such a deployment can accurately determine the locations of incidents and traffic jams. It can also estimate travel times accurately for highways, for urban roads this is limited to a binary categorization into normal or congested traffic. No reliability issues are expected. The most cost efficient scenario when deploying a new FCD system is to launch a smartphone application. For Belgium, this costs 13 million EUR for 10 years. However, it is estimated that purchasing data from companies already acquiring FCD data through their own product could reduce costs with a factor 10
Situational reasoning for road driving in an urban environment
Robot navigation in urban environments requires situational reasoning.
Given the complexity of the environment and the behavior specified by traffic
rules, it is necessary to recognize the current situation to impose the correct
traffic rules. In an attempt to manage the complexity of the situational reasoning
subsystem, this paper describes a finite state machine model to govern the situational
reasoning process. The logic state machine and its interaction with the
planning system are discussed. The approach was implemented on Alice, Team
Caltech’s entry into the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. Results from the qualifying
rounds are discussed. The approach is validated and the shortcomings of
the implementation are identified
Implementation and Evaluation of a Cooperative Vehicle-to-Pedestrian Safety Application
While the development of Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) safety applications based
on Dedicated Short-Range Communications (DSRC) has been extensively undergoing
standardization for more than a decade, such applications are extremely missing
for Vulnerable Road Users (VRUs). Nonexistence of collaborative systems between
VRUs and vehicles was the main reason for this lack of attention. Recent
developments in Wi-Fi Direct and DSRC-enabled smartphones are changing this
perspective. Leveraging the existing V2V platforms, we propose a new framework
using a DSRC-enabled smartphone to extend safety benefits to VRUs. The
interoperability of applications between vehicles and portable DSRC enabled
devices is achieved through the SAE J2735 Personal Safety Message (PSM).
However, considering the fact that VRU movement dynamics, response times, and
crash scenarios are fundamentally different from vehicles, a specific framework
should be designed for VRU safety applications to study their performance. In
this article, we first propose an end-to-end Vehicle-to-Pedestrian (V2P)
framework to provide situational awareness and hazard detection based on the
most common and injury-prone crash scenarios. The details of our VRU safety
module, including target classification and collision detection algorithms, are
explained next. Furthermore, we propose and evaluate a mitigating solution for
congestion and power consumption issues in such systems. Finally, the whole
system is implemented and analyzed for realistic crash scenarios
Probabilistic Hybrid Action Models for Predicting Concurrent Percept-driven Robot Behavior
This article develops Probabilistic Hybrid Action Models (PHAMs), a realistic
causal model for predicting the behavior generated by modern percept-driven
robot plans. PHAMs represent aspects of robot behavior that cannot be
represented by most action models used in AI planning: the temporal structure
of continuous control processes, their non-deterministic effects, several modes
of their interferences, and the achievement of triggering conditions in
closed-loop robot plans.
The main contributions of this article are: (1) PHAMs, a model of concurrent
percept-driven behavior, its formalization, and proofs that the model generates
probably, qualitatively accurate predictions; and (2) a resource-efficient
inference method for PHAMs based on sampling projections from probabilistic
action models and state descriptions. We show how PHAMs can be applied to
planning the course of action of an autonomous robot office courier based on
analytical and experimental results
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