Dynamic Occupancy Grid Prediction for Urban Autonomous Driving: A Deep Learning Approach with Fully Automatic Labeling

Long-term situation prediction plays a crucial role in the development of intelligent vehicles. A major challenge still to overcome is the prediction of complex downtown scenarios with multiple road users, e.g., pedestrians, bikes, and motor vehicles, interacting with each other. This contribution tackles this challenge by combining a Bayesian filtering technique for environment representation, and machine learning as long-term predictor. More specifically, a dynamic occupancy grid map is utilized as input to a deep convolutional neural network. This yields the advantage of using spatially distributed velocity estimates from a single time step for prediction, rather than a raw data sequence, alleviating common problems dealing with input time series of multiple sensors. Furthermore, convolutional neural networks have the inherent characteristic of using context information, enabling the implicit modeling of road user interaction. Pixel-wise balancing is applied in the loss function counteracting the extreme imbalance between static and dynamic cells. One of the major advantages is the unsupervised learning character due to fully automatic label generation. The presented algorithm is trained and evaluated on multiple hours of recorded sensor data and compared to Monte-Carlo simulation

RH-Map: Online Map Construction Framework of Dynamic Objects Removal Based on Region-wise Hash Map Structure

Mobile robots navigating in outdoor environments frequently encounter the issue of undesired traces left by dynamic objects and manifested as obstacles on map, impeding robots from achieving accurate localization and effective navigation. To tackle the problem, a novel map construction framework based on 3D region-wise hash map structure (RH-Map) is proposed, consisting of front-end scan fresher and back-end removal modules, which realizes real-time map construction and online dynamic object removal (DOR). First, a two-layer 3D region-wise hash map structure of map management is proposed for effective online DOR. Then, in scan fresher, region-wise ground plane estimation (R-GPE) is adopted for estimating and preserving ground information and Scan-to-Map Removal (S2M-R) is proposed to discriminate and remove dynamic regions. Moreover, the lightweight back-end removal module maintaining keyframes is proposed for further DOR. As experimentally verified on SemanticKITTI, our proposed framework yields promising performance on online DOR of map construction compared with the state-of-the-art methods. And we also validate the proposed framework in real-world environments

Motion Estimation in Occupancy Grid Maps in Stationary Settings Using Recurrent Neural Networks

In this work, we tackle the problem of modeling the vehicle environment as dynamic occupancy grid map in complex urban scenarios using recurrent neural networks. Dynamic occupancy grid maps represent the scene in a bird's eye view, where each grid cell contains the occupancy probability and the two dimensional velocity. As input data, our approach relies on measurement grid maps, which contain occupancy probabilities, generated with lidar measurements. Given this configuration, we propose a recurrent neural network architecture to predict a dynamic occupancy grid map, i.e. filtered occupancy and velocity of each cell, by using a sequence of measurement grid maps. Our network architecture contains convolutional long-short term memories in order to sequentially process the input, makes use of spatial context, and captures motion. In the evaluation, we quantify improvements in estimating the velocity of braking and turning vehicles compared to the state-of-the-art. Additionally, we demonstrate that our approach provides more consistent velocity estimates for dynamic objects, as well as, less erroneous velocity estimates in static area.Comment: Accepted for presentation at the 2020 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 31 - June 4, 2020, Paris, Franc