PROUD-Public road urban driverless test: Architecture and results

The presence of autonomous vehicles on public roads is becoming a reality. In the last 10 years, autonomous prototypes have been confined in controlled or isolated environments, but new traffic regulations for testing and direct automotive companies interests are moving autonomous vehicles tests on real roads. This paper presents a test on public urban roads and freeways that was held in Parma on July 12, 2013. This was the first test in open public urban roads with nobody behind the steering wheel: the vehicle had to cope with roundabouts, junctions, pedestrian crossings, freeway junctions, traffic lights, and regular traffic. The vehicle setup, the software architecture, and the route are here presented together with some results and possible future improvements.

[1]  Anthony Stentz,et al.  A Guide to Heuristic-based Path Planning , 2005 .

[2]  Alberto Broggi,et al.  The Oshkosh-VisLab Joint Efforts on UGVs: Architecture, Integration, and Results , 2007 .

[3]  Massimo Bertozzi,et al.  GOLD: A Framework for Developing Intelligent-Vehicle Vision Applications , 2008, IEEE Intelligent Systems.

[4]  Sebastian Thrun,et al.  Autonomous driving in semi-structured environments: Mapping and planning , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[5]  Venkataraman Sundareswaran,et al.  TerraMax: Team Oshkosh Urban Robot , 2009, The DARPA Urban Challenge.

[6]  Pietro Cerri,et al.  Test-bed for Unified Perception & Decision Architecture , 2009 .

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

[8]  Luca Gatti,et al.  VIAC: An out of ordinary experiment , 2011, 2011 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV).

[9]  Yan Jiang,et al.  Design of a universal self-driving system for urban scenarios — BIT-III in the 2011 Intelligent Vehicle Future Challenge , 2012, 2012 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium.

[10]  Dongwook Kim,et al.  Environment-Detection-and-Mapping Algorithm for Autonomous Driving in Rural or Off-Road Environment , 2012, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems.

[11]  Kevin Curran,et al.  OpenStreetMap , 2012, Int. J. Interact. Commun. Syst. Technol..

[12]  Alberto Broggi,et al.  Autonomous vehicles control in the VisLab Intercontinental Autonomous Challenge , 2012, Annu. Rev. Control..

[13]  J. Christian Gerdes,et al.  Autonomous Vehicle Control at the Limits of Handling , 2012 .

[14]  Alberto Broggi,et al.  Extensive Tests of Autonomous Driving Technologies , 2013, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems.

[15]  Alberto Broggi,et al.  Moving from analog to digital driving , 2013, 2013 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV).