Autonomous driving strategies for urban and highway environments

由于集成电路的能力越来越强，传感、计算和通信能力的不断扩展已经使一个又一个行业发生了革命性的变化。随着汽车学习自动驾驶，提高安全性、效率和乘客舒适性，汽车行业将成为下一个主要革命领域之一。这项研究项目旨在通过以经济和实用的方式最大限度地利用尚未实现的潜在利益-车辆对车辆和车辆-路边通信以及视觉、激光测距和雷达传感器，来帮助实现自动驾驶领域的这场革命。 这项工作将专注于高速公路车辆排队、紧急制动场景以及静态和动态对象检测，从而实现目前普通公众无法获得的大多数关键人类驾驶能力。通过利用低延迟通信来创建多车道配置和混合设备解决方案，高速公路排队和紧急制动将得到推进。包括视觉传感器和现场可编程门阵列在内的定制专用硬件解决方案将实现实时目标跟踪、在线标志和红绿灯检测以及行人碰撞避免。 为了能够快速验证新的算法和硬件组件，将构建一支独特的六分之一规模的自动驾驶车队，配备低延迟通信、足够的车载计算能力和所有必要的传感器。这些电动汽车将能够以每小时50公里的速度运行，并将包括转向、制动和悬挂部件，以更准确地模拟真实的道路驾驶条件。

The relentless expansion of sensing, computing and communication capability being realized due to ever more capable integrated circuits has revolutionized industry after industry. The automotive sector is poised to be one of the next major area of revolution, as vehicles learn to drive themselves, increasing safety, efficiency and passenger comfort. This research project seeks to help bring about this revolution in autonomous driving by maximally exploiting the unrealized potential benefits vehicle to vehicle and vehicle to roadside communication as well as vision, laser ranging and radar sensors in an economical and practical manner. The work will focus on highway vehicle platooning, emergency braking scenarios, and static and dynamic object detection, enabling most of the key human driver capabilities currently not available to the general public. Highway platooning and emergency braking will be advanced by exploiting low-latency communication to create multi-lane configurations and mixed-equipage solutions. Customized, dedicated hardware solutions including vision sensors and FPGAs will enable real time object tracking, online sign and stoplight detection, and pedestrian collision avoidance. To enable rapid validation of new algorithms and hardware components, a unique 1/6th scale autonomous driving vehicle fleet will be constructed, complete with low-latency communication, sufficient onboard computation power, and all the necessary sensors. These electric vehicles will be capable of operating at 50 kph and will include steering, braking and suspension components to more accurate mimic true on-road driving conditions.