Using monocular visual SLAM to manually convoy a fleet of automatic urban vehicles

This paper addresses platooning navigation as part of new transportation services emerging nowadays in urban areas. Platooning formation is ensured using a global decentralized control strategy supported by inter-vehicle communications. A large motion flexibility is achieved according to a manual guidance mode, i.e. the path to follow is inferred online from the motion of the manually driven first vehicle. For this purpose, a visual SLAM algorithm that relies on monocular vision is run on the lead vehicle and coupled with a trajectory creation procedure. Both the map and trajectory updates are shared online with the following vehicles and permit them to derive their absolute location with respect to a common reference trajectory from their current camera image. Full-scale experiments with two urban vehicles demonstrate the performance of the proposed approach.

[1]  Domenico Prattichizzo,et al.  Discussion of paper by , 2003 .

[2]  Michel Dhome,et al.  Real Time Localization and 3D Reconstruction , 2006, 2006 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR'06).

[3]  Bruce A. Francis,et al.  Vision-Based Vehicle Trajectory Following with Constant Time Delay , 2009, FSR.

[4]  Christopher G. Harris,et al.  A Combined Corner and Edge Detector , 1988, Alvey Vision Conference.

[5]  Andrew J. Davison,et al.  Real-time simultaneous localisation and mapping with a single camera , 2003, Proceedings Ninth IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision.

[6]  Philippe Martinet,et al.  Accurate platoon control of urban vehicles, based solely on monocular vision , 2010, 2010 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[7]  Helder Araújo,et al.  A Fully Projective Formulation to Improve the Accuracy of Lowe's Pose-Estimation Algorithm , 1998, Comput. Vis. Image Underst..

[8]  M. Athans,et al.  On the optimal error regulation of a string of moving vehicles , 1966 .

[9]  John Valasek,et al.  Preliminary results of one-dimensional vehicle formation control using a structural analogy , 2003, Proceedings of the 2003 American Control Conference, 2003..

[10]  Abder Koukam,et al.  Bending Virtual Spring-Damper: A Solution to Improve Local Platoon Control , 2009, ICCS.

[11]  Patrick Rives,et al.  Vision-based Control for Car Platooning using Homography Decomposition , 2005, Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[12]  Andrew W. Fitzgibbon,et al.  Bundle Adjustment - A Modern Synthesis , 1999, Workshop on Vision Algorithms.

[13]  Philippe Martinet,et al.  On-line reference trajectory generation for manually convoying a platoon of automatic urban vehicles , 2009, 2009 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.