The upsurge of autonomous vehicles in the automobile industry will lead to better driving experiences while also enabling the users to solve challenging navigation problems. Reaching such capabilities will require significant technological attention and the flawless execution of various complex tasks, one of which is ensuring robust localization and mapping. Recent surveys have not provided a meaningful and comprehensive description of the current approaches in this field. Accordingly, this review is intended to provide adequate coverage of the problems affecting autonomous vehicles in this area, by examining the most recent methods for mapping and localization as well as related feature extraction and data security problems. First, a discussion of the contemporary methods of extracting relevant features from equipped sensors and their categorization as semantic, non-semantic, and deep learning methods is presented. We conclude that representativeness, low cost, and accessibility are crucial constraints in the choice of the methods to be adopted for localization and mapping tasks. Second, the survey focuses on methods to build a vehicle’s environment map, considering both the commercial and the academic solutions available. The analysis proposes a difference between two types of environment, known and unknown, and develops solutions in each case. Third, the survey explores different approaches to vehicle localization and also classifies them according to their mathematical characteristics and priorities. Each section concludes by presenting the related challenges and some future directions. The article also highlights the security problems likely to be encountered in self-driving vehicles, with an assessment of possible defense mechanisms that could prevent security attacks in vehicles. Finally, the article ends with a debate on the potential impacts of autonomous driving, spanning energy consumption and emission reduction, sound and light pollution, integration into smart cities, infrastructure optimization, and software refinement. This thorough investigation aims to foster a comprehensive understanding of the diverse implications of autonomous driving across various domains.

The optimal control models proposed in the literature to control a population of diabetics are all single-objective which limits the identification of alternatives and potential opportunities for different reasons: the minimization of the total does not necessarily imply the minimization of different terms and two patients from two different compartments may not support the same intensity of exercise or the same severity of regime. In this work, we propose a multi-objectives optimal control model to control a population of diabetics taking into account the specificity of each compartment such that each objective function involves a single compartment and a single control. In addition, the Pontryagin’s maximum principle results in expansive control that devours all resources because of max-min operators and the control formula is very complex and difficult to assimilate by the diabetologists. In our case, we use a multi-objectives heuristic method, NSGA-II, to estimate the optimal control based on our model. Since the objective functions are conflicting, we obtain the Pareto optimal front formed by the non-dominated solutions and we use fuzzy C-means to determine the important main strategies based on a typical characterization. To limit human intervention, during the control period, we use the convolution operator to reduce hyper-fluctuations using kernels with different size. Several experiments were conducted and the proposed system highlights four feasible control strategies capable of mitigating socio-economic damages for a reasonable budget.

Self-driving vehicles need a robust positioning system to continue the revolution in intelligent transportation. Global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) are most commonly used to accomplish this task because of their ability to accurately locate the vehicle in the environment. However, recent publications have revealed serious cases where GNSS fails miserably to determine the position of the vehicle, for example, under a bridge, in a tunnel, or in dense forests. In this work, we propose a framework architecture of explaining deep learning LiDAR-based (XDLL) models that predicts the position of the vehicles by using only a few LiDAR points in the environment, which ensures the required fastness and accuracy of interactions between vehicle components. The proposed framework extracts non-semantic features from LiDAR scans using a clustering algorithm. The identified clusters serve as input to our deep learning model, which relies on LSTM and GRU layers to store the trajectory points and convolutional layers to smooth the data. The model has been extensively tested with short- and long-term trajectories from two benchmark datasets, Kitti and NCLT, containing different environmental scenarios. Moreover, we investigated the obtained results by explaining the contribution of each cluster feature by using several explainable methods, including Saliency, SmoothGrad, and VarGrad. The analysis showed that taking the mean of all the clusters as an input for the model is enough to obtain better accuracy compared to the first model, and it reduces the time consumption as well. The improved model is able to obtain a mean absolute positioning error of below one meter for all sequences in the short- and long-term trajectories.

Soft computing models based on fuzzy or probabilistic approaches provide decision system makers with the necessary capabilities to deal with imprecise and incomplete information. Hybrid systems based on different soft computing approaches with complementary qualities and principles have also become popular. On the one hand, fuzzy logic makes its decisions on the basis of the degree of membership but gives no information on the frequency of an event; on the other hand, the probability informs us of the frequency of the event but gives no information on the degree of membership to a set. In this work, we propose a new measure that implements both fuzzy and probabilistic notions (i.e., the degree of membership and the frequency) while exploiting the ability of the convolution operator to combine functions on continuous intervals. This measure evaluates both the degree of membership and the frequency of objects/events in the design of decision support systems. We show, using concrete examples, the drawbacks of fuzzy logic and probability-based approaches taken separately, and we then show how a fuzzy probabilistic convolution measure allows the correction of these drawbacks. Based on this measure, we introduce a new clustering method named Fuzzy-Probabilistic-Convolution-C-Means (FP-Conv-CM). Fuzzy C-Means (FCM), Probabilistic K-Means (PKM), and FP-Conv-CM were tested on multiple datasets and compared on the basis of two performance measures based on the Silhouette metric and the Dunn’s Index. FP-Conv-CM was shown to improve on both metrics. In addition, FCM, PKM, and FP-Conv-CM were used for multiple image compression tasks and were compared based on three performance measures: Mean Square Error (MSE), Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), and Structural SImilarity Index (SSIM). The proposed FP-Conv-CM method shows improvements in all these three measures as well.