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Article
A Perception-Driven Autonomous Urban Vehicle
Journal of Field Robotics (2008)
  • John Leonard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Jonathan How, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Seth Teller, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Mitch Berger, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Stefan Campbell, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Gaston Fiore, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Luke Fletcher, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Emilio Frazzoli, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Albert Huang, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Sertac Karaman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Olivier Koch, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Yoshiaki Kuwata, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • David Moore, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Edwin Olson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Steve Peters, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Justin Teo, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Robert Truax, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Matthew Walter, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • David Barrett
  • Alexander Epstein
  • Keoni Mahelona
  • Katy Moyer
  • Troy Jones
  • Ryan Buckley
  • Matthew Antone
  • Robert Galejs
  • Siddhartha Krishnamurthy
  • Jonathan Williams
Abstract

This paper describes the architecture and implementation of an autonomous passenger vehicle designed to navigate using locally perceived information in preference to potentially inaccurate or incomplete map data. The vehicle architecture was designed to handle the original DARPA Urban Challenge requirements of perceiving and navigating a road network with segments defined by sparse waypoints. The vehicle implementation includes many heterogeneous sensors with significant communications and computation bandwidth to capture and process high-resolution, high-rate sensor data. The output of the comprehensive environmental sensing subsystem is fed into a kinodynamic motion planning algorithm to generate all vehicle motion. The requirements of driving in lanes, three-point turns, parking, and maneuvering through obstacle fields are all generated with a unified planner. A key aspect of the planner is its use of closed-loop simulation in a rapidly exploring randomized trees algorithm, which can randomly explore the space while efficiently generating smooth trajectories in a dynamic and uncertain environment. The overall system was realized through the creation of a powerful new suite of software tools for message passing, logging, and visualization. These innovations provide a strong platform for future research in autonomous driving in global positioning system�denied and highly dynamic environments with poor a priori information.

Publication Date
October 1, 2008
Publisher Statement

This article appears in Journal of Field Robotics, Volume 25, Issue 10, Page 727-774. © 2008 Cambridge University Press. The publisher's version can be found here.

Citation Information
John Leonard, Jonathan How, Seth Teller, Mitch Berger, et al.. "A Perception-Driven Autonomous Urban Vehicle" Journal of Field Robotics Vol. 25 Iss. 10 (2008)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/david_barrett/1/