Contextual information aided target tracking and path planning for autonomous ground vehicles

Recently, autonomous vehicles have received worldwide attentions from academic research, automotive industry and the general public. In order to achieve a higher level of automation, one of the most fundamental requirements of autonomous vehicles is the capability to respond to internal and external changes in a safe, timely and appropriate manner. Situational awareness and decision making are two crucial enabling technologies for safe operation of autonomous vehicles. This thesis presents a solution for improving the automation level of autonomous vehicles in both situational awareness and decision making aspects by utilising additional domain knowledge such as constraints and influence on a moving object caused by environment and interaction between different moving objects. This includes two specific sub-systems, model based target tracking in environmental perception module and motion planning in path planning module. In the first part, a rigorous Bayesian framework is developed for pooling road constraint information and sensor measurement data of a ground vehicle to provide better situational awareness. Consequently, a new multiple targets tracking (MTT) strategy is proposed for solving target tracking problems with nonlinear dynamic systems and additional state constraints. Besides road constraint information, a vehicle movement is generally affected by its surrounding environment known as interaction information. A novel dynamic modelling approach is then proposed by considering the interaction information as virtual force which is constructed by involving the target state, desired dynamics and interaction information. The proposed modelling approach is then accommodated in the proposed MTT strategy for incorporating different types of domain knowledge in a comprehensive manner. In the second part, a new path planning strategy for autonomous vehicles operating in partially known dynamic environment is suggested. The proposed MTT technique is utilized to provide accurate on-board tracking information with associated level of uncertainty. Based on the tracking information, a path planning strategy is developed to generate collision free paths by not only predicting the future states of the moving objects but also taking into account the propagation of the associated estimation uncertainty within a given horizon. To cope with a dynamic and uncertain road environment, the strategy is implemented in a receding horizon fashion

New multiple target tracking strategy using domain knowledge and optimisation

This paper proposes an environment-dependent vehicle dynamic modeling approach considering interactions between the noisy control input of a dynamic model and the environment in order to make best use of domain knowledge. Based on this modeling, a new domain knowledge-aided moving horizon estimation (DMHE) method is proposed for ground moving target tracking. The proposed method incorporates different types of domain knowledge in the estimation process considering both environmental physical constraints and interaction behaviors between targets and the environment. Furthermore, in order to deal with a data association ambiguity problem of multiple-target tracking in a cluttered environment, the DMHE is combined with a multiple-hypothesis tracking structure. Numerical simulation results show that the proposed DMHE-based method and its extension could achieve better performance than traditional tracking methods which utilize no domain knowledge or simple physical constraint information only

New environmental dependent modelling with Gaussian particle filtering based implementation for ground vehicle tracking

This paper proposes a new domain knowledge aided Gaussian particle filtering based approach for the ground vehicle tracking application. Firstly, a new form of modelling is proposed to reflect the influences of different types of environmental domain knowledge on the vehicle dynamic: i) a non-Markov jump model is applied with multiple models while transition probabilities between models are environmental dependent ii) for a particular model, both the constraints and potential forces obtained from the surrounding environment have been applied to refine the vehicle state distribution. Based on the proposed modelling approach, a Gaussian particle filtering based method is developed to implement the related Bayesian inference for the target state estimation. Simulation studies from multiple Monte Carlo simulations confirm the advantages of the proposed method over traditional ones, from both the modelling and implementation aspects

New multiple target tracking strategy using domain knowledge and optimisation - supporting data (single target tracking scenario)

Related data for SMC paper 'New Multiple Target Tracking Strategy Using Domain Knowledge and Optimisation'. This is data related to the 'single target tracking scenario'

New multiple target tracking strategy using domain knowledge and optimisation - supporting data (multiple target tracking scenario)

Related data for SMC paper 'New Multiple Target Tracking Strategy Using Domain Knowledge and Optimisation'. This data related to the multiple target tracking scenario

New environmental dependent modeling with Gaussian particle filtering based implementation for ground vehicle tracking

This paper proposes a new domain knowledge aided Gaussian particle filtering based approach for the ground vehicle tracking application. Firstly, a new form of modeling is proposed to reflect the influences of different types of environmental domain knowledge on the vehicle dynamic: i) a non-Markov jump model is applied with multiple models while transition probabilities between models are environmental dependent ii) for a particular model, both the constraints and potential forces obtained from the surrounding environment have been applied to refine the vehicle state distribution. Based on the proposed modeling approach, a Gaussian particle filtering based method is developed to implement the related Bayesian inference for the target state estimation. Simulation studies from multiple Monte Carlo simulations confirm the advantages of the proposed method over traditional ones, from both the modeling and implementation aspects