Traversable Region Detection and Tracking for a Sparse 3D Laser Scanner for Off-Road Environments Using Range Images

This study proposes a method for detecting and tracking traversable regions in off-road conditions for unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs). Off-road conditions, such as rough terrain or fields, present significant challenges for UGV navigation, and detecting and tracking traversable regions is essential to ensure safe and efficient operation. Using a 3D laser scanner and range-image-based approach, a method is proposed for detecting traversable regions under off-road conditions; this is followed by a Bayesian fusion algorithm for tracking the traversable regions in consecutive frames. Our range-image-based traversable-region-detection approach enables efficient processing of point cloud data from a 3D laser scanner, allowing the identification of traversable areas that are safe for the unmanned ground vehicle to drive on. The effectiveness of the proposed method was demonstrated using real-world data collected during UGV operations on rough terrain, highlighting its potential as a solution for improving UGV navigation capabilities in challenging environments.

Deep tracking in the wild: End-to-end tracking using recurrent neural networks

This paper presents a novel approach for tracking static and dynamic objects for an autonomous vehicle operating in complex urban environments. Whereas traditional approaches for tracking often feature numerous hand-engineered stages, this method is learned end-to-end and can directly predict a fully unoccluded occupancy grid from raw laser input. We employ a recurrent neural network to capture the state and evolution of the environment, and train the model in an entirely unsupervised manner. In doing so, our use case compares to model-free, multi-object tracking although we do not explicitly perform the underlying data-association process. Further, we demonstrate that the underlying representation learned for the tracking task can be leveraged via inductive transfer to train an object detector in a data efficient manner. We motivate a number of architectural features and show the positive contribution of dilated convolutions, dynamic and static memory units to the task of tracking and classifying complex dynamic scenes through full occlusion. Our experimental results illustrate the ability of the model to track cars, buses, pedestrians, and cyclists from both moving and stationary platforms. Further, we compare and contrast the approach with a more traditional model-free multi-object tracking pipeline, demonstrating that it can more accurately predict future states of objects from current inputs.

Model-free detection and tracking of dynamic objects with 2D lidar

We present a new approach to detection and tracking of moving objects with a 2D laser scanner for autonomous driving applications. Objects are modelled with a set of rigidly attached sample points along their boundaries whose positions are initialized with and updated by raw laser measurements, thus allowing a non-parametric representation that is capable of representing objects independent of their classes and shapes. Detection and tracking of such object models are handled in a theoretically principled manner as a Bayes filter where the motion states and shape information of all objects are represented as a part of a joint state which includes in addition the pose of the sensor and geometry of the static part of the world. We derive the prediction and observation models for the evolution of the joint state, and describe how the knowledge of the static local background helps in identifying dynamic objects from static ones in a principled and straightforward way. Dealing with raw laser points poses a significant challenge to data association. We propose a hierarchical approach, and present a new variant of the well-known Joint Compatibility Branch and Bound algorithm to respect and take advantage of the constraints of the problem introduced through correlations between observations. Finally, we calibrate the system systematically on real world data containing 7,500 labelled object examples and validate on 6,000 test cases. We demonstrate its performance over an existing industry standard targeted at the same problem domain as well as a classical approach to model-free object tracking.

Outdoor Map Construction Based on Aerial Photography and Electrical Map Using Multi-Plane Laser Range Scan Data

This research is on personal mobility that estimates its self position on a sensor data map created from sensor data, acquired from laser range scan sensors and/or other sensors, and annotates various multiple items of information on a digital map. This paper describes a method of creating an edge-based grid map from both aerial photography and an electricalmap for this purpose and a way and its realization to estimate position and to construct outdoor maps from multi-plane laser range scan data on the grid map. Since threedimensional scanning is rather difficult and the scan rate is low, we used two-dimensional scanning that enables movement without slowing it down by scanning multiple horizontal and/or slanted planes. Experimental results show that the system is able to ensure the accuracy of accumulated error within 2 m by integrating aerial photography and electrical maps plus multiplane scanning.