Automated Automotive Radar Calibration With Intelligent Vehicles

While automotive radar sensors are widely adopted and have been used for automatic cruise control and collision avoidance tasks, their application outside of vehicles is still limited. As they have the ability to resolve multiple targets in 3D space, radars can also be used for improving environment perception. This application, however, requires a precise calibration, which is usually a time-consuming and labor-intensive task. We, therefore, present an approach for automated and geo-referenced extrinsic calibration of automotive radar sensors that is based on a novel hypothesis filtering scheme. Our method does not require external modifications of a vehicle and instead uses the location data obtained from automated vehicles. This location data is then combined with filtered sensor data to create calibration hypotheses. Subsequent filtering and optimization recovers the correct calibration. Our evaluation on data from a real testing site shows that our method can correctly calibrate infrastructure sensors in an automated manner, thus enabling cooperative driving scenarios.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, accepted for presentation at the 31st European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO), September 4 - September 8, 2023, Helsinki, Finlan

Pedestrian Environment Model for Automated Driving

Besides interacting correctly with other vehicles, automated vehicles should also be able to react in a safe manner to vulnerable road users like pedestrians or cyclists. For a safe interaction between pedestrians and automated vehicles, the vehicle must be able to interpret the pedestrian's behavior. Common environment models do not contain information like body poses used to understand the pedestrian's intent. In this work, we propose an environment model that includes the position of the pedestrians as well as their pose information. We only use images from a monocular camera and the vehicle's localization data as input to our pedestrian environment model. We extract the skeletal information with a neural network human pose estimator from the image. Furthermore, we track the skeletons with a simple tracking algorithm based on the Hungarian algorithm and an ego-motion compensation. To obtain the 3D information of the position, we aggregate the data from consecutive frames in conjunction with the vehicle position. We demonstrate our pedestrian environment model on data generated with the CARLA simulator and the nuScenes dataset. Overall, we reach a relative position error of around 16% on both datasets.Comment: Accepted for presentation at the 26th IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC 2023), 24-28 September 2023, Bilbao, Bizkaia, Spai

Automated Static Camera Calibration with Intelligent Vehicles

Connected and cooperative driving requires precise calibration of the roadside infrastructure for having a reliable perception system. To solve this requirement in an automated manner, we present a robust extrinsic calibration method for automated geo-referenced camera calibration. Our method requires a calibration vehicle equipped with a combined GNSS/RTK receiver and an inertial measurement unit (IMU) for self-localization. In order to remove any requirements for the target's appearance and the local traffic conditions, we propose a novel approach using hypothesis filtering. Our method does not require any human interaction with the information recorded by both the infrastructure and the vehicle. Furthermore, we do not limit road access for other road users during calibration. We demonstrate the feasibility and accuracy of our approach by evaluating our approach on synthetic datasets as well as a real-world connected intersection, and deploying the calibration on real infrastructure. Our source code is publicly available.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, accepted for presentation at the 34th IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV 2023), June 4 - June 7, 2023, Anchorage, Alaska, United States of Americ

Novel use of an exchange catheter to facilitate intubation with an Aintree catheter in a tall patient with a predicted difficult airway: a case report

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Introduction</p> <p>The Aintree intubating catheter (Cook^®Medical Inc., Bloomington, IN, USA) has been shown to successfully facilitate difficult intubations when other methods have failed. The Aintree intubating catheter (Cook^®Medical Inc., Bloomington, IN, USA) has a fixed length of 56 cm, and it has been suggested in the literature that it may be too short for safe use in patients who are tall.</p> <p>Case presentation</p> <p>We present the case of a 32-year-old, 180 cm tall Caucasian woman with a predicted difficult airway who presented to our facility for an emergency cesarean section. After several failed intubation attempts via direct laryngoscopy, an airway was established with a laryngeal mask airway. After delivery of a healthy baby, our patient's condition necessitated tracheal intubation. A fiber-optic bronchoscope loaded with an Aintree intubating catheter (Cook^®Medical Inc., Bloomington, IN, USA) was passed through the laryngeal mask airway into the trachea until just above the carina, but was too short to safely allow for the passage of an endotracheal tube.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>We present a novel technique in which the Aintree intubating catheter (Cook^®Medical Inc., Bloomington, IN, USA) was replaced with a longer (100 cm) exchange catheter, over which an endotracheal tube was passed successfully into the trachea.</p

Differential branching fraction and angular analysis of the decay B0→K∗0μ+μ−

The angular distribution and differential branching fraction of the decay B 0→ K ∗0 μ + μ − are studied using a data sample, collected by the LHCb experiment in pp collisions at s√=7 TeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 1.0 fb−1. Several angular observables are measured in bins of the dimuon invariant mass squared, q 2. A first measurement of the zero-crossing point of the forward-backward asymmetry of the dimuon system is also presented. The zero-crossing point is measured to be q20=4.9±0.9GeV2/c4 , where the uncertainty is the sum of statistical and systematic uncertainties. The results are consistent with the Standard Model predictions

Opposite-side flavour tagging of B mesons at the LHCb experiment

The calibration and performance of the oppositeside flavour tagging algorithms used for the measurements of time-dependent asymmetries at the LHCb experiment are described. The algorithms have been developed using simulated events and optimized and calibrated with B + →J/ψK +, B0 →J/ψK ∗0 and B0 →D ∗− μ + νμ decay modes with 0.37 fb−1 of data collected in pp collisions at √ s = 7 TeV during the 2011 physics run. The oppositeside tagging power is determined in the B + → J/ψK + channel to be (2.10 ± 0.08 ± 0.24) %, where the first uncertainty is statistical and the second is systematic

Search for CP violation in D+→ϕπ+ and D+s→K0Sπ+ decays

A search for CP violation in D + → ϕπ + decays is performed using data collected in 2011 by the LHCb experiment corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 1.0 fb−1 at a centre of mass energy of 7 TeV. The CP -violating asymmetry is measured to be (−0.04 ± 0.14 ± 0.14)% for candidates with K − K + mass within 20 MeV/c 2 of the ϕ meson mass. A search for a CP -violating asymmetry that varies across the ϕ mass region of the D + → K − K + π + Dalitz plot is also performed, and no evidence for CP violation is found. In addition, the CP asymmetry in the D+s→K0Sπ+ decay is measured to be (0.61 ± 0.83 ± 0.14)%

Measurement of the Bs0→J/ψKS0B_s^0\to J/\psi K_S^0 branching fraction

The $B_s^0\to J/\psi K_S^0$ branching fraction is measured in a data sample corresponding to 0.41$fb^{-1}$ of integrated luminosity collected with the LHCb detector at the LHC. This channel is sensitive to the penguin contributions affecting the sin2$\beta$ measurement from $B^0\to J/\psi K_S^0$ The time-integrated branching fraction is measured to be $BF(B_s^0\to J/\psi K_S^0)=(1.83\pm0.28)\times10^{-5}$. This is the most precise measurement to date