An Online Learning System for Wireless Charging Alignment using Surround-view Fisheye Cameras

Electric Vehicles are increasingly common, with inductive chargepads being considered a convenient and efficient means of charging electric vehicles. However, drivers are typically poor at aligning the vehicle to the necessary accuracy for efficient inductive charging, making the automated alignment of the two charging plates desirable. In parallel to the electrification of the vehicular fleet, automated parking systems that make use of surround-view camera systems are becoming increasingly popular. In this work, we propose a system based on the surround-view camera architecture to detect, localize, and automatically align the vehicle with the inductive chargepad. The visual design of the chargepads is not standardized and not necessarily known beforehand. Therefore, a system that relies on offline training will fail in some situations. Thus, we propose a self-supervised online learning method that leverages the driver's actions when manually aligning the vehicle with the chargepad and combine it with weak supervision from semantic segmentation and depth to learn a classifier to auto-annotate the chargepad in the video for further training. In this way, when faced with a previously unseen chargepad, the driver needs only manually align the vehicle a single time. As the chargepad is flat on the ground, it is not easy to detect it from a distance. Thus, we propose using a Visual SLAM pipeline to learn landmarks relative to the chargepad to enable alignment from a greater range. We demonstrate the working system on an automated vehicle as illustrated in the video at https://youtu.be/_cLCmkW4UYo. To encourage further research, we will share a chargepad dataset used in this work.Comment: Accepted for publication at IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation System

Near-field Perception for Low-Speed Vehicle Automation using Surround-view Fisheye Cameras

Cameras are the primary sensor in automated driving systems. They provide high information density and are optimal for detecting road infrastructure cues laid out for human vision. Surround-view camera systems typically comprise of four fisheye cameras with 190{\deg}+ field of view covering the entire 360{\deg} around the vehicle focused on near-field sensing. They are the principal sensors for low-speed, high accuracy, and close-range sensing applications, such as automated parking, traffic jam assistance, and low-speed emergency braking. In this work, we provide a detailed survey of such vision systems, setting up the survey in the context of an architecture that can be decomposed into four modular components namely Recognition, Reconstruction, Relocalization, and Reorganization. We jointly call this the 4R Architecture. We discuss how each component accomplishes a specific aspect and provide a positional argument that they can be synergized to form a complete perception system for low-speed automation. We support this argument by presenting results from previous works and by presenting architecture proposals for such a system. Qualitative results are presented in the video at https://youtu.be/ae8bCOF77uY.Comment: Accepted for publication at IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation System

Pre-Trained Driving in Localized Surroundings with Semantic Radar Information and Machine Learning

Entlang der Signalverarbeitungskette von Radar Detektionen bis zur Fahrzeugansteuerung, diskutiert diese Arbeit eine semantischen Radar Segmentierung, einen darauf aufbauenden Radar SLAM, sowie eine im Verbund realisierte autonome Parkfunktion. Die Radarsegmentierung der (statischen) Umgebung wird durch ein Radar-spezifisches neuronales Netzwerk RadarNet erreicht. Diese Segmentierung ermöglicht die Entwicklung des semantischen Radar Graph-SLAM SERALOC. Auf der Grundlage der semantischen Radar SLAM Karte wird eine beispielhafte autonome Parkfunktionalität in einem realen Versuchsträger umgesetzt. Entlang eines aufgezeichneten Referenzfades parkt die Funktion ausschließlich auf Basis der Radar Wahrnehmung mit bisher unerreichter Positioniergenauigkeit. Im ersten Schritt wird ein Datensatz von 8.2 · 10^6 punktweise semantisch gelabelten Radarpunktwolken über eine Strecke von 2507.35m generiert. Es sind keine vergleichbaren Datensätze dieser Annotationsebene und Radarspezifikation öffentlich verfügbar. Das überwachte Training der semantischen Segmentierung RadarNet erreicht 28.97% mIoU auf sechs Klassen. Außerdem wird ein automatisiertes Radar-Labeling-Framework SeRaLF vorgestellt, welches das Radarlabeling multimodal mittels Referenzkameras und LiDAR unterstützt. Für die kohärente Kartierung wird ein Radarsignal-Vorfilter auf der Grundlage einer Aktivierungskarte entworfen, welcher Rauschen und andere dynamische Mehrwegreflektionen unterdrückt. Ein speziell für Radar angepasstes Graph-SLAM-Frontend mit Radar-Odometrie Kanten zwischen Teil-Karten und semantisch separater NDT Registrierung setzt die vorgefilterten semantischen Radarscans zu einer konsistenten metrischen Karte zusammen. Die Kartierungsgenauigkeit und die Datenassoziation werden somit erhöht und der erste semantische Radar Graph-SLAM für beliebige statische Umgebungen realisiert. Integriert in ein reales Testfahrzeug, wird das Zusammenspiel der live RadarNet Segmentierung und des semantischen Radar Graph-SLAM anhand einer rein Radar-basierten autonomen Parkfunktionalität evaluiert. Im Durchschnitt über 42 autonome Parkmanöver (∅3.73 km/h) bei durchschnittlicher Manöverlänge von ∅172.75m wird ein Median absoluter Posenfehler von 0.235m und End-Posenfehler von 0.2443m erreicht, der vergleichbare Radar-Lokalisierungsergebnisse um ≈ 50% übertrifft. Die Kartengenauigkeit von veränderlichen, neukartierten Orten über eine Kartierungsdistanz von ∅165m ergibt eine ≈ 56%-ige Kartenkonsistenz bei einer Abweichung von ∅0.163m. Für das autonome Parken wurde ein gegebener Trajektorienplaner und Regleransatz verwendet

TiEV: The Tongji Intelligent Electric Vehicle in the Intelligent Vehicle Future Challenge of China

TiEV is an autonomous driving platform implemented by Tongji University of China. The vehicle is drive-by-wire and is fully powered by electricity. We devised the software system of TiEV from scratch, which is capable of driving the vehicle autonomously in urban paths as well as on fast express roads. We describe our whole system, especially novel modules of probabilistic perception fusion, incremental mapping, the 1st and the 2nd planning and the overall safety concern. TiEV finished 2016 and 2017 Intelligent Vehicle Future Challenge of China held at Changshu. We show our experiences on the development of autonomous vehicles and future trends

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) for Autonomous Driving: Concept and Analysis

The Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) technique has achieved astonishing progress over the last few decades and has generated considerable interest in the autonomous driving community. With its conceptual roots in navigation and mapping, SLAM outperforms some traditional positioning and localization techniques since it can support more reliable and robust localization, planning, and controlling to meet some key criteria for autonomous driving. In this study the authors first give an overview of the different SLAM implementation approaches and then discuss the applications of SLAM for autonomous driving with respect to different driving scenarios, vehicle system components and the characteristics of the SLAM approaches. The authors then discuss some challenging issues and current solutions when applying SLAM for autonomous driving. Some quantitative quality analysis means to evaluate the characteristics and performance of SLAM systems and to monitor the risk in SLAM estimation are reviewed. In addition, this study describes a real-world road test to demonstrate a multi-sensor-based modernized SLAM procedure for autonomous driving. The numerical results show that a high-precision 3D point cloud map can be generated by the SLAM procedure with the integration of Lidar and GNSS/INS. Online four–five cm accuracy localization solution can be achieved based on this pre-generated map and online Lidar scan matching with a tightly fused inertial system

FisheyeMultiNet: Real-time Multi-task Learning Architecture for Surround-view Automated Parking System.

Automated Parking is a low speed manoeuvring scenario which is quite unstructured and complex, requiring full 360° near-field sensing around the vehicle. In this paper, we discuss the design and implementation of an automated parking system from the perspective of camera based deep learning algorithms. We provide a holistic overview of an industrial system covering the embedded system, use cases and the deep learning architecture. We demonstrate a real-time multi-task deep learning network called FisheyeMultiNet, which detects all the necessary objects for parking on a low-power embedded system. FisheyeMultiNet runs at 15 fps for 4 cameras and it has three tasks namely object detection, semantic segmentation and soiling detection. To encourage further research, we release a partial dataset of 5,000 images containing semantic segmentation and bounding box detection ground truth via WoodScape project [Yogamani et al., 2019]