Junior 3: A test platform for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems

Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) are becoming more common in today's vehicles with more complex functions being implemented in production vehicles. On the research side, significant technology development in hardware and software has been spurred in recent years by the DARPA Grand Challenge and Urban Challenge in 2005 and 2007 respectively. This paper describes ‘Junior 3’, a vehicle built at Volkswagen Group of America's Electronics Research Lab, based on the knowledge gained from the DARPA Challenges and applied to ADAS functionalities. Specifically we focussed on object detection and vehicle positioning capabilities with close to production grade sensors and describe an ‘Autonomous Valet Parking’ and ‘Object Tracking’ application with this system.

[1]  Charles E. Thorpe,et al.  Range sensor based outdoor vehicle Navigation, collision avoidance and parallel parking , 1995, Auton. Robots.

[2]  Sebastian Thrun,et al.  Model based vehicle detection and tracking for autonomous urban driving , 2009, Auton. Robots.

[3]  Todd Jochem,et al.  Rapidly Adapting Machine Vision for Automated Vehicle Steering , 1996, IEEE Expert.

[4]  Reinhold Behringer,et al.  The seeing passenger car 'VaMoRs-P' , 1994, Proceedings of the Intelligent Vehicles '94 Symposium.

[5]  Roman Henze,et al.  Reproducible transverse dynamics vehicle evaluation in the double lane change , 2008 .

[6]  Dirk Haehnel,et al.  Junior: The Stanford entry in the Urban Challenge , 2008 .

[7]  Reid G. Simmons,et al.  A task description language for robot control , 1998, Proceedings. 1998 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. Innovations in Theory, Practice and Applications (Cat. No.98CH36190).

[8]  Sebastian Thrun,et al.  Winning the DARPA Grand Challenge with an AI Robot , 2006, AAAI.

[9]  Sebastian Thrun,et al.  Junior: The Stanford entry in the Urban Challenge , 2008, J. Field Robotics.