MapLite: Autonomous Intersection Navigation Without a Detailed Prior Map

In this work, we present MapLite: a one-click autonomous navigation system capable of piloting a vehicle to an arbitrary desired destination point given only a sparse publicly available topometric map (from OpenStreetMap). The onboard sensors are used to segment the road region and register the topometric map in order to fuse the high-level navigation goals with a variational path planner in the vehicle frame. This enables the system to plan trajectories that correctly navigate road intersections without the use of an external localization system such as GPS or a detailed prior map. Since the topometric maps already exist for the vast majority of roads, this solution greatly increases the geographical scope for autonomous mobility solutions. We implement MapLite on a full-scale autonomous vehicle and exhaustively test it on over 15 km of road including over 100 autonomous intersection traversals. We further extend these results through simulated testing to validate the system on complex road junction topologies such as traffic circles.

[1]  J.M. Alvarez,et al.  Illuminant-invariant model-based road segmentation , 2008, 2008 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium.

[2]  Alexey Dosovitskiy,et al.  End-to-End Driving Via Conditional Imitation Learning , 2017, 2018 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

[3]  Bernardo Wagner,et al.  Autonomous robot navigation based on OpenStreetMap geodata , 2010, 13th International IEEE Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems.

[4]  Alberto Broggi,et al.  Vision-Based Road Detection in Automotive Systems: A Real-Time Expectation-Driven Approach , 1995, J. Artif. Intell. Res..

[5]  Bastian Leibe,et al.  OpenStreetSLAM: Global vehicle localization using OpenStreetMaps , 2013, 2013 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[6]  Augusto Luis Ballardini,et al.  Leveraging the OSM building data to enhance the localization of an urban vehicle , 2016, 2016 IEEE 19th International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC).

[7]  Ryan M. Eustice,et al.  Fast LIDAR localization using multiresolution Gaussian mixture maps , 2015, 2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

[8]  Markus H. Gross,et al.  Efficient simplification of point-sampled surfaces , 2002, IEEE Visualization, 2002. VIS 2002..

[9]  R. C. Coulter,et al.  Implementation of the Pure Pursuit Path Tracking Algorithm , 1992 .

[10]  Zhe Chen,et al.  Progressive LiDAR adaptation for road detection , 2019, IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica.

[11]  Sebastian Thrun,et al.  Robust vehicle localization in urban environments using probabilistic maps , 2010, 2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[12]  Young-Woo Seo,et al.  Detection and tracking of boundary of unmarked roads , 2014, 17th International Conference on Information Fusion (FUSION).

[13]  Nanning Zheng,et al.  An efficient road detection method in noisy urban environment , 2009, 2009 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium.

[14]  Mohamed Aly,et al.  Real time detection of lane markers in urban streets , 2008, 2008 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium.

[15]  Augusto Luis Ballardini,et al.  A Framework for Outdoor Urban Environment Estimation , 2015, 2015 IEEE 18th International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems.

[16]  Wolfram Burgard,et al.  Map-Based Precision Vehicle Localization in Urban Environments , 2008 .

[17]  Thomas Moore,et al.  A Generalized Extended Kalman Filter Implementation for the Robot Operating System , 2014, IAS.

[18]  Liam Paull,et al.  Autonomous Vehicle Navigation in Rural Environments Without Detailed Prior Maps , 2018, 2018 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

[19]  Leonidas J. Guibas,et al.  PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation , 2016, 2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR).

[20]  Nils J. Nilsson,et al.  A Formal Basis for the Heuristic Determination of Minimum Cost Paths , 1968, IEEE Trans. Syst. Sci. Cybern..

[21]  David Janz,et al.  Learning to Drive in a Day , 2018, 2019 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

[22]  H.-H. Nagel,et al.  Texture-based segmentation of road images , 1994, Proceedings of the Intelligent Vehicles '94 Symposium.

[23]  Xin Zhang,et al.  End to End Learning for Self-Driving Cars , 2016, ArXiv.

[24]  Wei Liu,et al.  Vision-Based Real-Time Lane Marking Detection and Tracking , 2008, 2008 11th International IEEE Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems.

[25]  Xavier Bresson,et al.  Convolutional Neural Networks on Graphs with Fast Localized Spectral Filtering , 2016, NIPS.

[26]  Augusto Luis Ballardini,et al.  An online probabilistic road intersection detector , 2017, 2017 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

[27]  M. J. D. Powell,et al.  An efficient method for finding the minimum of a function of several variables without calculating derivatives , 1964, Comput. J..

[28]  Richard B. Langley,et al.  The UTM Grid System , 2022 .

[29]  Guy Rosman,et al.  Variational End-to-End Navigation and Localization , 2018, 2019 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

[30]  Julius Ziegler,et al.  Making Bertha Drive—An Autonomous Journey on a Historic Route , 2014, IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Magazine.

[31]  Germán Ros,et al.  CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator , 2017, CoRL.

[32]  Lennart Svensson,et al.  Fast LIDAR-based Road Detection Using Convolutional Neural Networks , 2017 .

[33]  Patrick Weber,et al.  OpenStreetMap: User-Generated Street Maps , 2008, IEEE Pervasive Computing.

[34]  Ryan M. Eustice,et al.  Visual localization within LIDAR maps for automated urban driving , 2014, 2014 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[35]  Lennart Svensson,et al.  LIDAR-Camera Fusion for Road Detection Using Fully Convolutional Neural Networks , 2018, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[36]  C. D. Boor,et al.  On Calculating B-splines , 1972 .