Towards Full Automated Drive in Urban Environments: A Demonstration in GoMentum Station, California

Each year, millions of motor vehicle traffic accidents all over the world cause a large number of fatalities, injuries and significant material loss. Automated Driving (AD) has potential to drastically reduce such accidents. In this work, we focus on the technical challenges that arise from AD in urban environments. We present the overall architecture of an AD system and describe in detail the perception and planning modules. The AD system, built on a modified Acura RLX, was demonstrated in a course in GoMentum Station in California. We demonstrated autonomous handling of 4 scenarios: traffic lights, cross-traffic at intersections, construction zones and pedestrians. The AD vehicle displayed safe behavior and performed consistently in repeated demonstrations with slight variations in conditions. Overall, we completed 44 runs, encompassing 110km of automated driving with only 3 cases where the driver intervened the control of the vehicle, mostly due to error in GPS positioning. Our demonstration showed that robust and consistent behavior in urban scenarios is possible, yet more investigation is necessary for full scale roll-out on public roads.Comment: Accepted to Intelligent Vehicles Conference (IV 2017

Analysis-by-synthesis: Pedestrian tracking with crowd simulation models in a multi-camera video network

For tracking systems consisting of multiple cameras with overlapping field-of-views, homography-based approaches are widely adopted to significantly reduce occlusions among pedestrians by sharing information among multiple views. However, in these approaches, the usage of information under real-world coordinates is only at a preliminary level. Therefore, in this paper, a multi-camera tracking system with integrated crowd simulation is proposed in order to explore the possibility to make homography information more helpful. Two crowd simulators with different simulation strategies are used to investigate the influence of the simulation strategy on the final tracking performance. The performance is evaluated by multiple object tracking precision and accuracy (MOTP and MOTA) metrics, for all the camera views and the results obtained under real-world coordinates. The experimental results demonstrate that crowd simulators boost the tracking performance significantly, especially for crowded scenes with higher density. In addition, a more realistic simulation strategy helps to further improve the overall tracking result

The Double Hierarchy Method: a parallel 3D contact method for the interaction of spherical particles with rigid FE boundaries using the DEM

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s40571-016-0109-4In this work, we present a new methodology for the treatment of the contact interaction between rigid boundaries and spherical discrete elements (DE). Rigid body parts are present in most of large-scale simulations. The surfaces of the rigid parts are commonly meshed with a finite element-like (FE) discretization. The contact detection and calculation between those DE and the discretized boundaries is not straightforward and has been addressed by different approaches. The algorithm presented in this paper considers the contact of the DEs with the geometric primitives of a FE mesh, i.e. facet, edge or vertex. To do so, the original hierarchical method presented by Horner et al. (J Eng Mech 127(10):1027–1032, 2001) is extended with a new insight leading to a robust, fast and accurate 3D contact algorithm which is fully parallelizable. The implementation of the method has been developed in order to deal ideally with triangles and quadrilaterals. If the boundaries are discretized with another type of geometries, the method can be easily extended to higher order planar convex polyhedra. A detailed description of the procedure followed to treat a wide range of cases is presented. The description of the developed algorithm and its validation is verified with several practical examples. The parallelization capabilities and the obtained performance are presented with the study of an industrial application example.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

On the dynamics and collisional growth of planetesimals in misaligned binary systems

Context. Abridged. Many stars are members of binary systems. During early phases when the stars are surrounded by discs, the binary orbit and disc midplane may be mutually inclined. The discs around T Tauri stars will become mildly warped and undergo solid body precession around the angular momentum vector of the binary system. It is unclear how planetesimals in such a disc will evolve and affect planet formation. Aims. We investigate the dynamics of planetesimals embedded in discs that are perturbed by a binary companion on a circular, inclined orbit. We examine collisional velocities of the planetesimals to determine when they can grow through accretion. We vary the binary inclination, binary separation, D, disc mass, and planetesimal radius. Our standard model has D=60 AU, inclination=45 deg, and a disc mass equivalent to the MMSN. Methods. We use a 3D hydrodynamics code to model the disc. Planetesimals are test particles which experience gas drag, the gravitational force of the disc, the companion star gravity. Planetesimal orbit crossing events are detected and used to estimate collisional velocities. Results. For binary systems with modest inclination (25 deg), disc gravity prevents planetesimal orbits from undergoing strong differential nodal precession (which occurs in absence of the disc), and forces planetesimals to precess with the disc on average. For bodies of different size the orbit planes become modestly mutually inclined, leading to collisional velocities that inhibit growth. For larger inclinations (45 degrees), the Kozai effect operates, leading to destructively large relative velocities. Conclusions. Planet formation via planetesimal accretion is difficult in an inclined binary system with parameters similar to those considered in this paper. For systems in which the Kozai mechanism operates, the prospects for forming planets are very remote.Comment: 24 pages, 16 figures, recently published in Astronomy and Astrophysic

REBOUND: An open-source multi-purpose N-body code for collisional dynamics

REBOUND is a new multi-purpose N-body code which is freely available under an open-source license. It was designed for collisional dynamics such as planetary rings but can also solve the classical N-body problem. It is highly modular and can be customized easily to work on a wide variety of different problems in astrophysics and beyond. REBOUND comes with three symplectic integrators: leap-frog, the symplectic epicycle integrator (SEI) and a Wisdom-Holman mapping (WH). It supports open, periodic and shearing-sheet boundary conditions. REBOUND can use a Barnes-Hut tree to calculate both self-gravity and collisions. These modules are fully parallelized with MPI as well as OpenMP. The former makes use of a static domain decomposition and a distributed essential tree. Two new collision detection modules based on a plane-sweep algorithm are also implemented. The performance of the plane-sweep algorithm is superior to a tree code for simulations in which one dimension is much longer than the other two and in simulations which are quasi-two dimensional with less than one million particles. In this work, we discuss the different algorithms implemented in REBOUND, the philosophy behind the code's structure as well as implementation specific details of the different modules. We present results of accuracy and scaling tests which show that the code can run efficiently on both desktop machines and large computing clusters.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figures, accepted by A&A, source code available at https://github.com/hannorein/reboun