Tiago C. dos Santos

Luis Alberto Rosero, Iago Pacheco Gomes, Júnior Anderson Rodrigues da Silva et al.

The objective of the first CARLA autonomous driving challenge was to deploy autonomous driving systems to lead with complex traffic scenarios where all participants faced the same challenging traffic situations. According to the organizers, this competition emerges as a way to democratize and to accelerate the research and development of autonomous vehicles around the world using the CARLA simulator contributing to the development of the autonomous vehicle area. Therefore, this paper presents the architecture design for the navigation of an autonomous vehicle in a simulated urban environment that attempts to commit the least number of traffic infractions, which used as the baseline the original architecture of the platform for autonomous navigation CaRINA 2. Our agent traveled in simulated scenarios for several hours, demonstrating his capabilities, winning three out of the four tracks of the challenge, and being ranked second in the remaining track. Our architecture was made towards meeting the requirements of CARLA Autonomous Driving Challenge and has components for obstacle detection using 3D point clouds, traffic signs detection and classification which employs Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and depth information, risk assessment with collision detection using short-term motion prediction, decision-making with Markov Decision Process (MDP), and control using Model Predictive Control (MPC).

Andrés E. Gómez, Tiago C. dos Santos, Carlos M. Massera et al.

According to data from the United Nations, more than 3000 people have died each day in the world due to road traffic collision. Considering recent researches, the human error may be considered as the main responsible for these fatalities. Because of this, researchers seek alternatives to transfer the vehicle control from people to autonomous systems. However, providing this technological innovation for the people may demand complex challenges in the legal, economic and technological areas. Consequently, carmakers and researchers have divided the driving automation in safety and emergency systems that improve the driver perception on the road. This may reduce the human error. Therefore, the main contribution of this study is to propose a driving simulator platform to develop and evaluate safety and emergency systems, in the first design stage. This driving simulator platform has an advantage: a flexible software structure.This allows in the simulation one adaptation for development or evaluation of a system. The proposed driving simulator platform was tested in two applications: cooperative vehicle system development and the influence evaluation of a Driving Assistance System (\textit{DAS}) on a driver. In the cooperative vehicle system development, the results obtained show that the increment of the time delay in the communication among vehicles ($V2V$) is determinant for the system performance. On the other hand, in the influence evaluation of a \textit{DAS} in a driver, it was possible to conclude that the \textit{DAS'} model does not have the level of influence necessary in a driver to avoid an accident.