2,845 research outputs found
Development of a Car-like Online Navigation Testbed
We present new realtime path planning and collision avoidance algorithms for an autonomous rover equipped with a laser range finder to be used as a platform for multi-agent navigation and control in unknown environments. For successful navigation, such tasks as localization, map-building, and collision avoidance should be handled at the vehicle level. The proposed architecture covers these aspects of robotic path- planning in a modular and robust manner, allowing quicker development of more sophisticated path-planners. Using a conventional SLAM algorithm, a feature map and the location of the vehicle is obtained. The information for orientation and distance of the obstacles ahead is available from a laser range finder. The proposed collision avoidance algorithm provides multiple paths to guide the vehicle through the environment. The system acts as a self-contained extendable platform for development and testing of high-level pathfinders
Messiah: An ITS drive safety application
This article describes a novel safety application based on the open source navigation software OsmAnd,
which runs on the Android platform. The application offers vehicles with "smart navigation", and maintains a network
of the vehicles that use our application. The process of network creation and maintenance is important as
our application enables vehicles to communicate with one another to exchange useful information. The main
function of the application is to inform vehicles of relevant vehicles approaching, termed as "administrative
vehicles" in this article, and include ambulances, police cars and fire brigades. Based on the received
information, our application notifies the driver, who can now take navigation decisions based on it. While developing
the application, problems were found when attempting to create an Ad-hoc network. A solution to the problem of managing the Ad-hoc network has been proposed and is under development
Towards a Testbed for Dynamic Vehicle Routing Algorithms
Since modern transport services are becoming more flexible, demand-responsive, and energy/cost efficient, there is a growing demand for large-scale microscopic simulation platforms in order to test sophisticated routing algorithms. Such platforms have to simulate in detail, not only the dynamically changing demand and supply of the relevant service, but also traffic flow and other relevant transport services. This paper presents the DVRP extension to the open-source MATSim simulator. The extension is designed to be highly general and customizable to simulate a wide range of dynamic rich vehicle routing problems. The extension allows plugging in of various algorithms that are responsible for continuous re-optimisation of routes in response to changes in the system. The DVRP extension has been used in many research and commercial projects dealing with simulation of electric and autonomous taxis, demand-responsive transport, personal rapid transport, free-floating car sharing and parking search
Managing big data experiments on smartphones
The explosive number of smartphones with ever growing sensing and computing capabilities have brought a paradigm shift to many traditional domains of the computing field. Re-programming smartphones and instrumenting them for application testing and data gathering at scale is currently a tedious and time-consuming process that poses significant logistical challenges. Next generation smartphone applications are expected to be much larger-scale and complex, demanding that these undergo evaluation and testing under different real-world datasets, devices and conditions. In this paper, we present an architecture for managing such large-scale data management experiments on real smartphones. We particularly present the building blocks of our architecture that encompassed smartphone sensor data collected by the crowd and organized in our big data repository. The given datasets can then be replayed on our testbed comprising of real and simulated smartphones accessible to developers through a web-based interface. We present the applicability of our architecture through a case study that involves the evaluation of individual components that are part of a complex indoor positioning system for smartphones, coined Anyplace, which we have developed over the years. The given study shows how our architecture allows us to derive novel insights into the performance of our algorithms and applications, by simplifying the management of large-scale data on smartphones
F1/10: An Open-Source Autonomous Cyber-Physical Platform
In 2005 DARPA labeled the realization of viable autonomous vehicles (AVs) a
grand challenge; a short time later the idea became a moonshot that could
change the automotive industry. Today, the question of safety stands between
reality and solved. Given the right platform the CPS community is poised to
offer unique insights. However, testing the limits of safety and performance on
real vehicles is costly and hazardous. The use of such vehicles is also outside
the reach of most researchers and students. In this paper, we present F1/10: an
open-source, affordable, and high-performance 1/10 scale autonomous vehicle
testbed. The F1/10 testbed carries a full suite of sensors, perception,
planning, control, and networking software stacks that are similar to full
scale solutions. We demonstrate key examples of the research enabled by the
F1/10 testbed, and how the platform can be used to augment research and
education in autonomous systems, making autonomy more accessible
AutoDRIVE: A Comprehensive, Flexible and Integrated Cyber-Physical Ecosystem for Enhancing Autonomous Driving Research and Education
Prototyping and validating hardware-software components, sub-systems and
systems within the intelligent transportation system-of-systems framework
requires a modular yet flexible and open-access ecosystem. This work presents
our attempt towards developing such a comprehensive research and education
ecosystem, called AutoDRIVE, for synergistically prototyping, simulating and
deploying cyber-physical solutions pertaining to autonomous driving as well as
smart city management. AutoDRIVE features both software as well as
hardware-in-the-loop testing interfaces with openly accessible scaled vehicle
and infrastructure components. The ecosystem is compatible with a variety of
development frameworks, and supports both single and multi-agent paradigms
through local as well as distributed computing. Most critically, AutoDRIVE is
intended to be modularly expandable to explore emergent technologies, and this
work highlights various complementary features and capabilities of the proposed
ecosystem by demonstrating four such deployment use-cases: (i) autonomous
parking using probabilistic robotics approach for mapping, localization, path
planning and control; (ii) behavioral cloning using computer vision and deep
imitation learning; (iii) intersection traversal using vehicle-to-vehicle
communication and deep reinforcement learning; and (iv) smart city management
using vehicle-to-infrastructure communication and internet-of-things
Low-Cost GNSS Simulators with Wireless Clock Synchronization for Indoor Positioning
In regions where global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) signals are
unavailable, such as underground areas and tunnels, GNSS simulators can be
deployed for transmitting simulated GNSS signals. Then, a GNSS receiver in the
simulator coverage outputs the position based on the received GNSS signals
(e.g., Global Positioning System (GPS) L1 signals in this study) transmitted by
the corresponding simulator. This approach provides periodic position updates
to GNSS users while deploying a small number of simulators without modifying
the hardware and software of user receivers. However, the simulator clock
should be synchronized to the GNSS satellite clock to generate almost identical
signals to the live-sky GNSS signals, which is necessary for seamless indoor
and outdoor positioning handover. The conventional clock synchronization method
based on the wired connection between each simulator and an outdoor GNSS
antenna causes practical difficulty and increases the cost of deploying the
simulators. This study proposes a wireless clock synchronization method based
on a private time server and time delay calibration. Additionally, we derived
the constraints for determining the optimal simulator coverage and separation
between adjacent simulators. The positioning performance of the proposed GPS
simulator-based indoor positioning system was demonstrated in the underground
testbed for a driving vehicle with a GPS receiver and a pedestrian with a
smartphone. The average position errors were 3.7 m for the vehicle and 9.6 m
for the pedestrian during the field tests with successful indoor and outdoor
positioning handovers. Since those errors are within the coverage of each
deployed simulator, it is confirmed that the proposed system with wireless
clock synchronization can effectively provide periodic position updates to
users where live-sky GNSS signals are unavailable.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Acces
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