Autonomous vehicles: challenges, opportunities, and future implications for transportation policies

This study investigates the challenges and opportunities pertaining to transportation policies that may arise as a result of emerging autonomous vehicle (AV) technologies. AV technologies can decrease the transportation cost and increase accessibility to low-income households and persons with mobility issues. This emerging technology also has far-reaching applications and implications beyond all current expectations. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the relevant literature and explores a broad spectrum of issues from safety to machine ethics. An indispensable part of a prospective AV development is communication over cars and infrastructure (connected vehicles). A major knowledge gap exists in AV technology with respect to routing behaviors. Connected-vehicle technology provides a great opportunity to implement an efficient and intelligent routing system. To this end, we propose a conceptual navigation model based on a fleet of AVs that are centrally dispatched over a network seeking system optimization. This study contributes to the literature on two fronts: (i) it attempts to shed light on future opportunities as well as possible hurdles associated with AV technology; and (ii) it conceptualizes a navigation model for the AV which leads to highly efficient traffic circulations

The gesturing screen : art and screen agency within postmedia assemblages

This thesis investigates screens as key elements in postmedia assemblages where multiple technical devices and media platforms function relationally to activate new capacities. I characterize the agency of screens as a gesturality that re-arranges and sustains medial relations with and between other components. The gestures of screens reformulate mediality, but also shift experiences and open elements to novel formations and affects. In each re- organisation of the postmedial assemblage, the function and relations of screens are not pre-defined but emerge in process. I develop this dynamic conception of screens and assemblages to account for their diverse manifestations in postmedia. Here I employ an agential realist framework found in the work of Karen Barad and draw on the concept of gestures set out by Giorgio Agamben. This research contributes to a new understanding of postmediality in conjunction with a new conception of the agency of screens. The thesis focuses on mainly digital screen-oriented artworks, repositioning these as heralding or firmly engaging with the postmedial condition. By challenging an understanding of screens that limits them to mere casings for images, this thesis expands the scope and role of screens in postmedia art practices stretching as far back as three decades. It argues that such art works and practices foreground the gesturality of screens and offers in-depth studies of works by Shilpa Gupta, Ulrike Gabriel, Natalie Bookchin, Blast Theory, Ragnar Kjartansson, Sandra Mujinga and Sondra Perry. Such works highlight how screens come to be relationally enacted in postmedia and how that enactment occurs through their performance of medial gestures. I identify two kinds of gestures of postmedia screens that support and connect the technical, aesthetic and in some cases political components of an assemblage. I turn to the multiplicity of frames both on-screen and distributed across screens observed by theorists of media such as Lev Manovich and Anne Friedberg. But the postmedial frame is consistently accompanied by what is out-of-frame – scrolling, swiping and ‘pinching’ continually calls on the out-of-frame to be moved on-screen. The out-of-frame is a postmedial screen gesture, then, that maintains an ongoing relation to the ‘inside’ of the frame, supporting and conditioning it. The multiple temporalities of postmedia assemblages – such as that of images, participants and software – allow an ‘out-of-frame’ to endure beyond the framed image. The second gesture is observed in the pervasiveness of chroma screens — blue and green screens used for compositing other images in postproduction. I suggest that this now ubiquitous technique suspends images from screens. Through a relational analysis of colour, and focusing on Perry’s work, I draw upon ways in which the blankness of chroma screens can be made to gesture a different enactment of race – ‘blackness’ as productive difference. Such gesture in postmedia entails the circulation and transference of social and cultural setting. These two gestures of screens highlight multiple dimensions of the relations of postmedial screens beyond that of framed images, offering us ways to be attentive to enactments of screens as they continue to gather relevance in our expanded visual setting. As screens multiply, this research suggests alternate ways of conceiving the aesthetics and experience of screens’ persistent medial configurations

Contribution à la localisation de véhicules intelligents à partir de marquage routier

Autonomous Vehicles (AV) applications and Advanced Driving Assistance Systems (ADAS) relay in scene understanding processes allowing high level systems to carry out decision marking. For such systems, the localization of a vehicle evolving in a structured dynamic environment constitutes a complex problem of crucial importance. Our research addresses scene structure detection, localization and error modeling. Taking into account the large functional spectrum of vision systems, the accessibility of Open Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and the widely presence of Global Positioning Systems (GPS) onboard vehicles, we study the performance and the reliability of a vehicle localization method combining such information sources. Monocular vision–based lane marking detection provides key information about the scene structure. Using an enhanced multi-kernel framework with hierarchical weights, the proposed parametric method performs, in real time, the detection and tracking of the ego-lane marking. A self-assessment indicator quantifies the confidence of this information source. We conduct our investigations in a localization system which tightly couples GPS, GIS and lane makings in the probabilistic framework of Particle Filter (PF). To this end, it is proposed the use of lane markings not only during the map-matching process but also to model the expected ego-vehicle motion. The reliability of the localization system, in presence of unusual errors from the different information sources, is enhanced by taking into account different confidence indicators. Such a mechanism is later employed to identify error sources. This research concludes with an experimental validation in real driving situations of the proposed methods. They were tested and its performance was quantified using an experimental vehicle and publicly available datasets.Les applications pour véhicules autonomes et les systèmes d’aide avancée à la conduite (Advanced Driving Assistance Systems - ADAS) mettent en oeuvre des processus permettant à des systèmes haut niveau de réaliser une prise de décision. Pour de tels systèmes, la connaissance du positionnement précis (ou localisation) du véhicule dans son environnement est un pré-requis nécessaire. Cette thèse s’intéresse à la détection de la structure de scène, au processus de localisation ainsi qu’à la modélisation d’erreurs. A partir d’un large spectre fonctionnel de systèmes de vision, de l’accessibilité d’un système de cartographie ouvert (Open Geographical Information Systems - GIS) et de la large diffusion des systèmes de positionnement dans les véhicules (Global Positioning System - GPS), cette thèse étudie la performance et la fiabilité d’une méthode de localisation utilisant ces différentes sources. La détection de marquage sur la route réalisée par caméra monoculaire est le point de départ permettant de connaître la structure de la scène. En utilisant, une détection multi-noyau avec pondération hiérarchique, la méthode paramétrique proposée effectue la détection et le suivi des marquages sur la voie du véhicule en temps réel. La confiance en cette source d’information a été quantifiée par un indicateur de vraisemblance. Nous proposons ensuite un système de localisation qui fusionne des informations de positionnement (GPS), la carte (GIS) et les marquages détectés précédemment dans un cadre probabiliste basé sur un filtre particulaire. Pour ce faire, nous proposons d’utiliser les marquages détectés non seulement dans l’étape de mise en correspondance des cartes mais aussi dans la modélisation de la trajectoire attendue du véhicule. La fiabilité du système de localisation, en présence d’erreurs inhabituelles dans les différentes sources d’information, est améliorée par la prise en compte de différents indicateurs de confiance. Ce mécanisme est par la suite utilisé pour identifier les sources d’erreur. Cette thèse se conclut par une validation expérimentale des méthodes proposées dans des situations réelles de conduite. Leurs performances ont été quantifiées en utilisant un véhicule expérimental et des données en libre accès sur internet