Fault-Tolerance by Graceful Degradation for Car Platoons

The key advantage of autonomous car platoons are their short inter-vehicle distances that increase traffic flow and reduce fuel consumption. However, this is challenging for operational and functional safety. If a failure occurs, the affected vehicles cannot suddenly stop driving but instead should continue their operation with reduced performance until a safe state can be reached or, in the case of temporal failures, full functionality can be guaranteed again. To achieve this degradation, platoon members have to be able to compensate sensor and communication failures and have to adjust their inter-vehicle distances to ensure safety. In this work, we describe a systematic design of degradation cascades for sensor and communication failures in autonomous car platoons using the example of an autonomous model car. We describe our systematic design method, the resulting degradation modes, and formulate contracts for each degradation level. We model and test our resulting degradation controller in Simulink/Stateflow

A Model-Predictive Motion Planner for the IARA Autonomous Car

We present the Model-Predictive Motion Planner (MPMP) of the Intelligent Autonomous Robotic Automobile (IARA). IARA is a fully autonomous car that uses a path planner to compute a path from its current position to the desired destination. Using this path, the current position, a goal in the path and a map, IARA's MPMP is able to compute smooth trajectories from its current position to the goal in less than 50 ms. MPMP computes the poses of these trajectories so that they follow the path closely and, at the same time, are at a safe distance of eventual obstacles. Our experiments have shown that MPMP is able to compute trajectories that precisely follow a path produced by a Human driver (distance of 0.15 m in average) while smoothly driving IARA at speeds of up to 32.4 km/h (9 m/s).Comment: This is a preprint. Accepted by 2017 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA

DeepPicar: A Low-cost Deep Neural Network-based Autonomous Car

We present DeepPicar, a low-cost deep neural network based autonomous car platform. DeepPicar is a small scale replication of a real self-driving car called DAVE-2 by NVIDIA. DAVE-2 uses a deep convolutional neural network (CNN), which takes images from a front-facing camera as input and produces car steering angles as output. DeepPicar uses the same network architecture---9 layers, 27 million connections and 250K parameters---and can drive itself in real-time using a web camera and a Raspberry Pi 3 quad-core platform. Using DeepPicar, we analyze the Pi 3's computing capabilities to support end-to-end deep learning based real-time control of autonomous vehicles. We also systematically compare other contemporary embedded computing platforms using the DeepPicar's CNN-based real-time control workload. We find that all tested platforms, including the Pi 3, are capable of supporting the CNN-based real-time control, from 20 Hz up to 100 Hz, depending on hardware platform. However, we find that shared resource contention remains an important issue that must be considered in applying CNN models on shared memory based embedded computing platforms; we observe up to 11.6X execution time increase in the CNN based control loop due to shared resource contention. To protect the CNN workload, we also evaluate state-of-the-art cache partitioning and memory bandwidth throttling techniques on the Pi 3. We find that cache partitioning is ineffective, while memory bandwidth throttling is an effective solution.Comment: To be published as a conference paper at RTCSA 201

The autonomous car - A blessing or a curse for the future of low carbon mobility? An exploration of likely vs. desirable outcomes

Certain developed countries have experienced the ‘peak car’ phenomenon. While this remains to be confirmed longitudinally, it looks certain that future mobility in Europe and elsewhere will be shaped by a particular technological development: driverless or autonomous transport. The ‘autonomous car’ ignites the imagination, yet the research and debate on this topic largely focus on the ‘autonomous’ and not adequately on the ‘car’ element. Like any new technological development, autonomous transport presents ample opportunities to better our mobility system, but similarly it carries risks and can lead into a future mobility that exacerbates, rather than relieves, current deficiencies of our mobility systems, including its high carbon and high cost characteristics. Now it is high time to explore these, before we lock ourselves into the autonomous car future. Using Low Carbon Mobility (LCM) as a guiding framework to assess mobility patterns and based on an extensive literature review, this paper aims to explore where there is a gap between the likely and desirable outcomes when developing the autonomous car and suggest how we might reduce it. Moreover, enhancing on global empirical evidence and forecasts about the opportunities and threats emerging from ICT deployment in transport and initial evidence on the development of the autonomous car, the paper concludes that a desirable outcome will only come if technological development will be accompanied by a social change. A change where public and sharing will be seen as superior to private and individual transport, could make the autonomous car a blessing

HOG Feature Extraction and KNN Classification for Detecting Vehicle in The Highway

Autonomous car is a vehicle that can guide itself without human intervention. Various types of rudderless vehicles are being developed. Future systems where computers take over the art of driving. The problem is prior to being attention in an autonomous car for obtaining the high safety. Autonomous car need early warning system to avoid accidents in front of the car, especially the system can be used in the Highway location. In this paper, we propose a vision-based vehicle detection system for Autonomous car. Our detection algorithm consists of three main components: HOG feature extraction, KNN classifier, and vehicle detection. Feature extraction has been used to recognize an object such as cars. In this case, we use HOG feature extraction to detect as a car or non-car. We use the KNN algorithm to classify. KNN Classification in previous studies had quite good results. Car detected by matching about trining data with testing data. Trining data created by extract HOG feature from image 304 x 240 pixels. The system will produce a classification between car or non-car