Edison Velasco-Sánchez

Miguel Ángel Muñoz-Bañón, Alejandro Olivas, Edison Velasco-Sánchez et al.

Feature-based geo-localization relies on associating features extracted from aerial imagery with those detected by the vehicle's sensors. This requires that the type of landmarks must be observable from both sources. This lack of variety of feature types generates poor representations that lead to outliers and deviations produced by ambiguities and lack of detections, respectively. To mitigate these drawbacks, in this paper, we present a dynamically weighted factor graph model for the vehicle's trajectory estimation. The weight adjustment in this implementation depends on information quantification in the detections performed using a LiDAR sensor. Also, a prior (GNSS-based) error estimation is included in the model. Then, when the representation becomes ambiguous or sparse, the weights are dynamically adjusted to rely on the corrected prior trajectory, mitigating outliers and deviations in this way. We compare our method against state-of-the-art geo-localization ones in a challenging and ambiguous environment, where we also cause detection losses. We demonstrate mitigation of the mentioned drawbacks where the other methods fail.

Ignacio de Loyola Páez-Ubieta, Edison P. Velasco-Sánchez, Santiago T. Puente

With the advancement of computing resources, an increasing number of Neural Networks (NNs) are appearing for image detection and segmentation appear. However, these methods usually accept as input a RGB 2D image. On the other side, Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) sensors with many layers provide images that are similar to those obtained from a traditional low resolution RGB camera. Following this principle, a new dataset for segmenting cars in pseudo-RGB images has been generated. This dataset combines the information given by the LiDAR sensor into a Spherical Range Image (SRI), concretely the reflectivity, near infrared and signal intensity 2D images. These images are then fed into instance segmentation NNs. These NNs segment the cars that appear in these images, having as result a Bounding Box (BB) and mask precision of 88% and 81.5% respectively with You Only Look Once (YOLO)-v8 large. By using this segmentation NN, some trackers have been applied so as to follow each car segmented instance along a video feed, having great performance in real world experiments.

Miguel Angel Munoz-Banon, Edison Velasco-Sanchez, Francisco A. Candelas et al.

OpenStreetMaps (OSM) is currently studied as the environment representation for autonomous navigation. It provides advantages such as global consistency, a heavy-less map construction process, and a wide variety of road information publicly available. However, the location of this information is usually not very accurate locally. In this paper, we present a complete autonomous navigation pipeline using OSM information as environment representation for global planning. To avoid the flaw of local low-accuracy, we offer the novel LiDAR-based Naive-Valley-Path (NVP) method that exploits the concept of "valley" areas to infer the local path always furthest from obstacles. This behavior allows navigation always through the center of trafficable areas following the road's shape independently of OSM error. Furthermore, NVP is a naive method that is highly sample-time-efficient. This time efficiency also enables obstacle avoidance, even for dynamic objects. We demonstrate the system's robustness in our research platform BLUE, driving autonomously across the University of Alicante Scientific Park for more than 20 km with 0.24 meters of average error against the road's center with a 19.8 ms of average sample time. Our vehicle avoids static obstacles in the road and even dynamic ones, such as vehicles and pedestrians.