Self-driving vehicles are a maturing technology with the potential to reshape mobility by enhancing the safety, accessibility, efficiency, and convenience of automotive transportation. Safety-critical tasks that must be executed by a self-driving vehicle include planning of motions through a dynamic environment shared with other vehicles and pedestrians, and their robust executions via feedback control. The objective of this paper is to survey the current state of the art on planning and control algorithms with particular regard to the urban setting. A selection of proposed techniques is reviewed along with a discussion of their effectiveness. The surveyed approaches differ in the vehicle mobility model used, in assumptions on the structure of the environment, and in computational requirements. The side by side comparison presented in this survey helps to gain insight into the strengths and limitations of the reviewed approaches and assists with system level design choices.

A Survey of Motion Planning and Control Techniques for Self-Driving Urban Vehicles

Intelligent vehicles have increased their capabilities for highly and, even fully, automated driving under controlled environments. Scene information is received using onboard sensors and communication network systems, i.e., infrastructure and other vehicles. Considering the available information, different motion planning and control techniques have been implemented to autonomously driving on complex environments. The main goal is focused on executing strategies to improve safety, comfort, and energy optimization. However, research challenges such as navigation in urban dynamic environments with obstacle avoidance capabilities, i.e., vulnerable road users (VRU) and vehicles, and cooperative maneuvers among automated and semi-automated vehicles still need further efforts for a real environment implementation. This paper presents a review of motion planning techniques implemented in the intelligent vehicles literature. A description of the technique used by research teams, their contributions in motion planning, and a comparison among these techniques is also presented. Relevant works in the overtaking and obstacle avoidance maneuvers are presented, allowing the understanding of the gaps and challenges to be addressed in the next years. Finally, an overview of future research direction and applications is given.

A Review of Motion Planning Techniques for Automated Vehicles

Self-driving vehicles are a maturing technology with the potential to reshape mobility by enhancing the safety, accessibility, efficiency, and convenience of automotive transportation. Safety-critical tasks that must be executed by a self-driving vehicle include planning of motions through a dynamic environment shared with other vehicles and pedestrians, and their robust executions via feedback control. The objective of this paper is to survey the current state of the art on planning and control algorithms with particular regard to the urban setting. A selection of proposed techniques is reviewed along with a discussion of their effectiveness. The surveyed approaches differ in the vehicle mobility model used, in assumptions on the structure of the environment, and in computational requirements. The side-by-side comparison presented in this survey helps to gain insight into the strengths and limitations of the reviewed approaches and assists with system level design choices.

A Survey of Motion Planning and Control Techniques for Self-driving Urban Vehicles

Advanced driver assistance systems (ADASs), and particularly pedestrian protection systems (PPSs), have become an active research area aimed at improving traffic safety. The major challenge of PPSs is the development of reliable on-board pedestrian detection systems. Due to the varying appearance of pedestrians (e.g., different clothes, changing size, aspect ratio, and dynamic shape) and the unstructured environment, it is very difficult to cope with the demanded robustness of this kind of system. Two problems arising in this research area are the lack of public benchmarks and the difficulty in reproducing many of the proposed methods, which makes it difficult to compare the approaches. As a result, surveying the literature by enumerating the proposals one--after-another is not the most useful way to provide a comparative point of view. Accordingly, we present a more convenient strategy to survey the different approaches. We divide the problem of detecting pedestrians from images into different processing steps, each with attached responsibilities. Then, the different proposed methods are analyzed and classified with respect to each processing stage, favoring a comparative viewpoint. Finally, discussion of the important topics is presented, putting special emphasis on the future needs and challenges.

http://www.cvc.uab.es/~asappa/publications/J__IEEE_PAMI_vol_32_Issue_7_July_2010.pdf

Survey of Pedestrian Detection for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems

Automated driving systems (ADSs) promise a safe, comfortable and efficient driving experience. However, fatalities involving vehicles equipped with ADSs are on the rise. The full potential of ADSs cannot be realized unless the robustness of state-of-the-art is improved further. This paper discusses unsolved problems and surveys the technical aspect of automated driving. Studies regarding present challenges, high-level system architectures, emerging methodologies and core functions including localization, mapping, perception, planning, and human machine interfaces, were thoroughly reviewed. Furthermore, many state-of-the-art algorithms were implemented and compared on our own platform in a real-world driving setting. The paper concludes with an overview of available datasets and tools for ADS development.

A Survey of Autonomous Driving: Common Practices and Emerging Technologies

http://www.ce.unipr.it/people/broggi/publications/cviu.2007.tetravision.pdf

Pedestrian detection by means of far-infrared stereo vision

This paper details filtering subsystem for a tetra-vision based pedestrian detection system. The complete system is based on the use of both visible and far infrared cameras; in an initial phase it produces a list of areas of attention in the images which can contain pedestrians. This list is furtherly refined using symmetry-based assumptions. Then, this results is fed to a number of independent validators that evaluate the presence of human shapes inside the areas of attention. Histogram of oriented gradients and Support Vector Machines are used as a filter and demonstrated to be able to successfully classify up to 91% of pedestrians in the areas of attention.

/pdf/a-pedestrian-detector-using-histograms-of-oriented-gradients-4omnvtqe3i.pdf

A Pedestrian Detector Using Histograms of Oriented Gradients and a Support Vector Machine Classifier

This article presents a tetra-vision (4 cameras) system for the detection of pedestrians by the means of the simultaneous use of one far infra-red and one visible cameras stereo pairs. The main idea is to exploit both the advantages of far infra-red and visible cameras trying at the same time to benefit from the use of each system. Initially, the two stereo flows are independently processed, then the results are fused together. The final result of this low-level processing is a list of obstacles that have a shape and a size compatible with the presence of a potential pedestrian. In addition, the system is able to remove the background from the detected obstacles to simplify a possible further high level processing. The developed system has been installed on an experimental vehicle and preliminarily tested in different situations.

http://www.ce.unipr.it/people/bertozzi/pap/cr/iv2006-tacom.pdf

Low-level Pedestrian Detection by means of Visible and Far Infra-red Tetra-vision

This paper presents the VisLab Intercontinental Autonomous Challenge (VIAC), an autonomous vehicles test carried out from Parma to Shanghai between July and October 2010 by the VisLab team. The vehicle equipment is explained introducing the sensing systems which were tested during the journey. Trip details and the first statistics are presented as well.

/pdf/the-vislab-intercontinental-autonomous-challenge-an-5eitub6jm2.pdf

The VisLab Intercontinental Autonomous Challenge: An Extensive Test for a Platoon of Intelligent Vehicles

This paper presents the preliminary results of VIAC, the VisLab Intercontinental Autonomous Challenge, a test of autonomous driving along an unknown route from Italy to China. It took 3 months to run the entire test; all data have been logged, including all data generated by the sensors, vehicle data, and GPS info. This huge amount of information has been packed during the trip, compressed, and transferred back to Parma for further processing. This data is now ready for a deep analysis of the various systems performance, with the aim of virtually running the whole trip multiple times with improved versions of the software. This paper discusses some preliminary figures obtained by the analysis of the data collected during the test. More information will be generated by a deeper analysis, which will take additional time, being the data about 40 terabyte in size.

/pdf/viac-an-out-of-ordinary-experiment-l3r2392752.pdf

Mirko Felisa

Papers

Pedestrian detection by means of far-infrared stereo vision

A Pedestrian Detector Using Histograms of Oriented Gradients and a Support Vector Machine Classifier

Low-level Pedestrian Detection by means of Visible and Far Infra-red Tetra-vision

The VisLab Intercontinental Autonomous Challenge: An Extensive Test for a Platoon of Intelligent Vehicles

VIAC: An out of ordinary experiment