Autonomous vehicles making use of Quasar

Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM)

Martin Dimitrievski and his colleagues propose a novel real-time method for SLAM in autonomous vehicles. The environment is mapped using a probabilistic occupancy map model and EGO motion is estimated within the same environment by using a feedback loop. Input data is provided via a rotating laser scanner as 3D measurements of the current environment which are projected on the ground plane. The local ground plane is estimated in real-time from the actual point cloud data using a robust plane fitting scheme. Then the computed occupancy map is registered against the previous map in order to estimate the translation and rotation of the vehicle. Experimental results demonstrate that the method produces high quality occupancy maps and the measured translation and rotation errors of the trajectories are lower compared to other 6 degrees of freedom methods. The entire SLAM system runs on a mid-range GPU and keeps up with the data from the sensor which enables more computational power for the other tasks of the autonomous vehicle.

“Many of the Autonomous Vehicles sub-systems are massively parallel and this is where Quasar can speed things up. From pre-processing of LIDAR point cloud data to odometry, object detection, tracking and route planning, Quasar made all of these components possible to run on a mid-range GPU in real-time. When you are done prototyping, you can consult the profiler to easily spot any areas for improved execution of the code.” – ir. Martin Dimitrievski

 

Example: SLAM for autonomous vehicles

Reference

Robust matching of occupancy maps for odometry in autonomous vehicles“; Martin Dimitrievski , David Van Hamme , Peter Veelaert, Wilfried Philips in
proceedings of Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications 2016 (VISIGRAPP).

Acknowledgements

The work was financially supported the Flanders Make ICON project 140647 “Environmental Modelling for automated Driving and Active Safety (EMDAS)”.