Title: Towards urban driverless vehicles

Authors: Rodrigo Benenson, Stephane Petti, Thierry Fraichard, Michel Parent

Addresses: INRIA Rocquencourt, Domaine de Voluceau. BP 105, Le Chesnay Cedex 78153, France. ' INRIA Rocquencourt, Domaine de Voluceau. BP 105, Le Chesnay Cedex 78153, France. ' INRIA Rocquencourt, Domaine de Voluceau. BP 105, Le Chesnay Cedex 78153, France. ' INRIA Rocquencourt, Domaine de Voluceau. BP 105, Le Chesnay Cedex 78153, France

Abstract: This paper addresses the problem of autonomous navigation of a car-like robot evolving in an urban environment. Such an environment exhibits an heterogeneous geometry and is cluttered with moving obstacles. Furthermore, in this context, motion safety is a critical issue. The proposed approach to the problem lies in the design of perception and planning modules that consider explicitly the dynamic nature of the vehicle and the environment while enforcing the safety constraint. The main contributions of this work are the development of such modules and integration into a single application. Initial full scale experiments validating the approach are presented.

Keywords: driverless cars; cybercars; motion planning; perception; normal distribution transform; NDT; vehicle localisation; mapping; SLAM; MOT; partial motion planner; PMP; autonomous navigation; car-like robots; urban driving; autonomous vehicles; motion safety.

DOI: 10.1504/IJVAS.2008.016486

International Journal of Vehicle Autonomous Systems, 2008 Vol.6 No.1/2, pp.4 - 23

Published online: 31 Dec 2007 *

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