Paving the Roadway for Safety of Automated Vehicles: An Empirical Study on Testing Challenges

The technology in the area of automated vehicles is gaining speed and promises many advantages. However, with the recent introduction of conditionally automated driving, we have also seen accidents. Test protocols for both, conditionally automated (e.g., on highways) and automated vehicles do not exist yet and leave researchers and practitioners with different challenges. For instance, current test procedures do not suffice for fully automated vehicles, which are supposed to be completely in charge for the driving task and have no driver as a back up. This paper presents current challenges of testing the functionality and safety of automated vehicles derived from conducting focus groups and interviews with 26 participants from five countries having a background related to testing automotive safety-related topics.We provide an overview of the state-of-practice of testing active safety features as well as challenges that needs to be addressed in the future to ensure safety for automated vehicles. The major challenges identified through the interviews and focus groups, enriched by literature on this topic are related to 1) virtual testing and simulation, 2) safety, reliability, and quality, 3) sensors and sensor models, 4) required scenario complexity and amount of test cases, and 5) handover of responsibility between the driver and the vehicle.Comment: 8 page

Performance Evaluation of a UWB Positioning System Applied to Static and Mobile Use Cases in Industrial Scenarios

Indoor positioning systems are essential in the industrial domain for optimized production and safe operation of mobile elements, such as mobile robots, especially in the presence of static machinery and human operators. In this paper, we assess the performance of a commercial UWB radio-based positioning system deployed in a realistic industrial scenario, considering both static and mobile use cases. Our goal is to characterize the accuracy of this system in the context of industrial use cases and applications. For the static case, an extensive analysis was presented based on measurements performed at 72 measurement positions at 3 different heights (above, at similar a level to, and below the average clutter level) in different industrial clutter conditions (open and cluttered spaces). The extensive analysis in the mobile case considered several runs of a route covered by an autonomous mobile robot equipped with multiple tags in different positions. The results indicate that a similar degree of accuracy with a median 2D positioning error smaller than 20 cm is possible in both static and mobile conditions with an optimized anchor deployment. The paper provides a complete statistical characterization of the system’s accuracy and addresses the multiple deployment trade-offs and system dynamics observed for the different configurations

Topological evaluation of volume reconstructions by voxel carving

Space or voxel carving [1, 4, 10, 15] is a technique for creating a three-dimensional reconstruction of an object from a series of two-dimensional images captured from cameras placed around the object at different viewing angles. However, little work has been done to date on evaluating the quality of space carving results. This paper extends the work reported in [8], where application of persistent homology was initially proposed as a tool for providing a topological analysis of the carving process along the sequence of 3D reconstructions with increasing number of cameras. We give now a more extensive treatment by: (1) developing the formal framework by which persistent homology can be applied in this context; (2) computing persistent homology of the 3D reconstructions of 66 new frames, including different poses, resolutions and camera orders; (3) studying what information about stability, topological correctness and influence of the camera orders in the carving performance can be drawn from the computed barcodes

Innovative Procedures for Travel Data Collection and Processing

Global Positioning System (GPS) or Smartphone technology has been increasingly used in travel data collection. Although GPS devices can directly record spatial and temporal information, trip ends, travel modes and trip purposes are not recorded. So GPS data processing becomes a critical procedure to produce these results, which can be used in transport planning. It has been proved that GPS records are more reliable than travel diaries; however, the quality of GPS data processing work usually influences the quality of results. Researchers have been engaging in the improvement of GPS data processing for the past decade. Traditionally, data processing for GPS records (from dedicated GPS loggers and Smartphones) includes three steps, namely trip identification, mode detection and purpose imputation. However, the results of mode and purpose detection are entirely based on the result of trip identification. Hence, the total accuracy of a GPS survey would be the product of the accuracy of each step. This thesis focuses on the improvement of travel data quality by improving data collection and processing. In this study, a new procedure is introduced which combines the process of trip identification and mode detection. Some general rules (i.e., a threshold of dwell time and the time interval for recording data) are tested. This research also firstly applies a new technology, a life-logging camera, to travel data collection. Images are used to help to pursue ground truth -- especially recorded trips in which GPS data were missing -- and detect some types of travel modes in order to improve the accuracy of data processing. An automating image processing procedure is proposed and tested in this study. In addition, a concept of “mode-point-chain” is discussed to identify the cases of mode change and modify incorrect mode detection results. For the process of purpose imputation, more travel information is suggested to be used in the process. This thesis also uses tour-based information in trip purpose imputation to improve the results. By using the new procedure, the trip identification accuracy was increased by almost 30 percent, taking the missing trips into account. Since trip identification and mode detection were combined, this increase also benefits mode detection results. With the help of image processing and the new procedure of mode change detection, the accuracy of mode detection increased by 7% regardless of the accuracy increase in trip identification. The new processing method also increased the accuracy of trip purpose imputation by 8%. This improvement can help researchers and planners obtain more accurate data for decision making and planning

An original application of image recognition based location in complex indoor environments

This paper describes the first results of an image recognition based location (IRBL) for a mobile application focusing on the procedure to generate a database of range images (RGB-D). In an indoor environment, to estimate the camera position and orientation, a prior spatial knowledge of the surroundings is needed. To achieve this objective, a complete 3D survey of two different environments (Bangbae metro station of Seoul and the Electronic and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) building in Daejeon, Republic of Korea) was performed using a LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) instrument, and the obtained scans were processed to obtain a spatial model of the environments. From this, two databases of reference images were generated using specific software realised by the Geomatics group of Politecnico di Torino (ScanToRGBDImage). This tool allows us to generate synthetically different RGB-D images centred in each scan position in the environment. Later, the external parameters (X, Y, Z, ω, ϕ, and κ) and the range information extracted from the retrieved database images are used as reference information for pose estimation of a set of acquired mobile pictures in the IRBL procedure. In this paper, the survey operations, the approach for generating the RGB-D images, and the IRB strategy are reported. Finally, the analysis of the results and the validation test are described