Raphael V. Carneiro

Claudine Badue, Rânik Guidolini, Raphael Vivacqua Carneiro et al.

We survey research on self-driving cars published in the literature focusing on autonomous cars developed since the DARPA challenges, which are equipped with an autonomy system that can be categorized as SAE level 3 or higher. The architecture of the autonomy system of self-driving cars is typically organized into the perception system and the decision-making system. The perception system is generally divided into many subsystems responsible for tasks such as self-driving-car localization, static obstacles mapping, moving obstacles detection and tracking, road mapping, traffic signalization detection and recognition, among others. The decision-making system is commonly partitioned as well into many subsystems responsible for tasks such as route planning, path planning, behavior selection, motion planning, and control. In this survey, we present the typical architecture of the autonomy system of self-driving cars. We also review research on relevant methods for perception and decision making. Furthermore, we present a detailed description of the architecture of the autonomy system of the self-driving car developed at the Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo (UFES), named Intelligent Autonomous Robotics Automobile (IARA). Finally, we list prominent self-driving car research platforms developed by academia and technology companies, and reported in the media.

Raphael V. Carneiro, Rafael C. Nascimento, Rânik Guidolini et al.

We propose the use of deep neural networks (DNN) for solving the problem of inferring the position and relevant properties of lanes of urban roads with poor or absent horizontal signalization, in order to allow the operation of autonomous cars in such situations. We take a segmentation approach to the problem and use the Efficient Neural Network (ENet) DNN for segmenting LiDAR remission grid maps into road maps. We represent road maps using what we called road grid maps. Road grid maps are square matrixes and each element of these matrixes represents a small square region of real-world space. The value of each element is a code associated with the semantics of the road map. Our road grid maps contain all information about the roads' lanes required for building the Road Definition Data Files (RDDFs) that are necessary for the operation of our autonomous car, IARA (Intelligent Autonomous Robotic Automobile). We have built a dataset of tens of kilometers of manually marked road lanes and used part of it to train ENet to segment road grid maps from remission grid maps. After being trained, ENet achieved an average segmentation accuracy of 83.7%. We have tested the use of inferred road grid maps in the real world using IARA on a stretch of 3.7 km of urban roads and it has shown performance equivalent to that of the previous IARA's subsystem that uses a manually generated RDDF.