Feature based SLAM using high-noise low-cost automotive sensors
- Ever since the 1980s, researchers in computer science and robotics have been working on making autonomous cars. Due to recent breakthroughs in research and devel- opment, such as the Bertha Benz Project [ZBS+14], the goal of fully autonomous vehicles seems closer than ever before. Yet a lot of questions remain unanswered. Especially now that the automotive industry moves towards autonomous systems in series production vehicles, the task of precise localization has to be solved with automotive grade sensors and keep memory and processing consumption at a mini- mum. This thesis investigates the Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) prob- lem for autonomous driving scenarios on a parking lot using low cost automotive sensors. The main focus is herby devoted to the RAdio Detection And Ranging (RADAR) sensor, which has not been widely analyzed in an autonomous driving scenario so far, even though they are abundant in the automotive industry for ap- plications such as Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC). Due to the high noise floor, the radar sensor has widely been disregarded in the Intelligent Transportation Systems and Robotics communities with regards to SLAM applications. However in this thesis, it is shown that the RADAR sensor proves to be an affordable, robust and precise sensor, when modeling its physical properties correctly. In this regard, a GraphSLAM based framework is introduced, which extracts features from the RADAR sensor and generates an optimized map of the surroundings using the RADAR sensor alone. This framework is used to enable crowd based localization, which is not limited to the RADAR sensor alone. By integrating an automotive Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) and stereo camera sensor, a robust and precise localization system can be built that that is suitable for autonomous driving even in complex parking lot scenarios. It it is thereby shown that the RADAR sensor is strongly contributing to obtaining good results in a sensor fusion setup. These results were obtained on an extensive dataset on a parking lot, which has been recorded over the course of several months. It contains different weather conditions, different configurations of parked cars and a multitude of different trajectories to validate the approaches described in this thesis and to come to the conclusion that the RADAR sensor is a reliable sensor in series autonomous driving systems, both in a multi sensor framework and as a single component for localization.
URN: | urn:nbn:de:bsz:rt2-opus4-30748 |
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DOI: | https://doi.org/10.15496/publikation-39705 |
Publisher: | Universität Tübingen |
Place of publication: | Tübingen |
Referee: | Cristóbal CurioORCiD, Andreas Schilling |
Referee of HS Reutlingen: | Curio, Cristóbal |
Document Type: | Doctoral Thesis |
Language: | English |
Publication year: | 2019 |
Date of final exam: | 2020/01/13 |
Tag: | autonomous driving; localization; self-driving car |
Page Number: | 158 |
Dissertation note: | Dissertation, Universität Tübingen, 2019 |
DDC classes: | 004 Informatik |
Open access?: | Ja |
Licence (German): | Open Access |