Alexander Rast

Sebastian Donnelly, Ruth Anderson, George Economides et al.

Remote Operation is touted as being key to the rapid deployment of automated vehicles. Streaming imagery to control connected vehicles remotely currently requires a reliable, high throughput network connection, which can be limited in real-world remote operation deployments relying on public network infrastructure. This paper investigates how the application of computer vision assisted semantic communication can be used to circumvent data loss and corruption associated with traditional image compression techniques. By encoding the segmentations of detected road users into colour coded highlights within low resolution greyscale imagery, the required data rate can be reduced by 50% compared with conventional techniques, while maintaining visual clarity. This enables a median glass-to-glass latency of below 200 ms even when the network data rate is below 500 kbit/s, while clearly outlining salient road users to enhance situational awareness of the remote operator. The approach is demonstrated in an area of variable 4G mobile connectivity using an automated last-mile delivery vehicle. Results indicate that large-scale deployment of remotely operated automated vehicles could be possible even on the often constrained public 4G/5G mobile network, providing the potential to expedite the nationwide roll-out of automated vehicles.

Aduen Benjumea, Andrew Bradley, Alexander Rast et al.

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) plays a crucial role in enabling autonomous vehicles to navigate previously unknown environments. Semantic SLAM mostly extends visual SLAM, leveraging the higher density information available to reason about the environment in a more human-like manner. This allows for better decision making by exploiting prior structural knowledge of the environment, usually in the form of labels. Current semantic SLAM techniques still mostly rely on a dense geometric representation of the environment, limiting their ability to apply constraints based on context. We propose PathSpace, a novel semantic SLAM framework that uses continuous B-splines to represent the environment in a compact manner, while also maintaining and reasoning through the continuous probability density functions required for probabilistic reasoning. This system applies the multiple strengths of B-splines in the context of SLAM to interpolate and fit otherwise discrete sparse environments. We test this framework in the context of autonomous racing, where we exploit pre-specified track characteristics to produce significantly reduced representations at comparable levels of accuracy to traditional landmark based methods and demonstrate its potential in limiting the resources used by a system with minimal accuracy loss.

Izzeddin Teeti, Valentina Musat, Salman Khan et al.

In an autonomous driving system, perception - identification of features and objects from the environment - is crucial. In autonomous racing, high speeds and small margins demand rapid and accurate detection systems. During the race, the weather can change abruptly, causing significant degradation in perception, resulting in ineffective manoeuvres. In order to improve detection in adverse weather, deep-learning-based models typically require extensive datasets captured in such conditions - the collection of which is a tedious, laborious, and costly process. However, recent developments in CycleGAN architectures allow the synthesis of highly realistic scenes in multiple weather conditions. To this end, we introduce an approach of using synthesised adverse condition datasets in autonomous racing (generated using CycleGAN) to improve the performance of four out of five state-of-the-art detectors by an average of 42.7 and 4.4 mAP percentage points in the presence of night-time conditions and droplets, respectively. Furthermore, we present a comparative analysis of five object detectors - identifying the optimal pairing of detector and training data for use during autonomous racing in challenging conditions.

Ivan Fursa, Elias Fandi, Valentina Musat et al.

Autonomous vehicles rely heavily upon their perception subsystems to see the environment in which they operate. Unfortunately, the effect of variable weather conditions presents a significant challenge to object detection algorithms, and thus it is imperative to test the vehicle extensively in all conditions which it may experience. However, development of robust autonomous vehicle subsystems requires repeatable, controlled testing - while real weather is unpredictable and cannot be scheduled. Real-world testing in adverse conditions is an expensive and time-consuming task, often requiring access to specialist facilities. Simulation is commonly relied upon as a substitute, with increasingly visually realistic representations of the real-world being developed. In the context of the complete autonomous vehicle control pipeline, subsystems downstream of perception need to be tested with accurate recreations of the perception system output, rather than focusing on subjective visual realism of the input - whether in simulation or the real world. This study develops the untapped potential of a lightweight weather augmentation method in an autonomous racing vehicle - focusing not on visual accuracy, but rather the effect upon perception subsystem performance in real time. With minimal adjustment, the prototype developed in this study can replicate the effects of water droplets on the camera lens, and fading light conditions. This approach introduces a latency of less than 8 ms using compute hardware well suited to being carried in the vehicle - rendering it ideal for real-time implementation that can be run during experiments in simulation, and augmented reality testing in the real world.