Empirical Evaluation of an Autonomous Vehicle in an Urban Environment

Ben Upcroft, Alexei Makarenko, Michael Moser, Alen Alempijevic, Ashod Donikian, Will Uther, Robert Fitch
2007 Journal of Aerospace Computing Information and Communication  
Operation in urban environments creates unique challenges for research in autonomous ground vehicles. Due to the presence of tall trees and buildings in close proximity to traversable areas, GPS outage is likely to be frequent and physical hazards pose real threats to autonomous systems. In this paper, we describe a novel autonomous platform developed by the Sydney-Berkeley Driving Team for entry into the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge competition. We report empirical results analyzing the
more » ... ce of the vehicle while navigating a 560-meter test loop multiple times in an actual urban setting with severe GPS outage. We show that our system is robust against failure of global position estimates and can reliably traverse standard two-lane road networks using vision for localization.
doi:10.2514/1.32839 fatcat:dgh5s7fv4ffvrim7ftlw6vkfwa