Self-driving vehicles are posing new challenges as the automation level defined in the SAE International standards for autonomous driving is increased. A pivotal task in autonomous driving is building a perception of the surrounding environment using optical sensors, which is a long-standing challenge and prompts us to explore the utilization of various sensors. Radar is an older and cheaper type of sensor than alternatives such as lidar for long-range distance coverage, and it is also competitively reliable and robust in adverse weather conditions. However, sparse data and noise are inherent challenges of radar. This study explores the dynamic Gaussian process for occupancy mapping and predicting a drivable path for a self-driving vehicle within the field of view (FOV) of a radar sensor. Gaussian occupancy mapping does not need abundant data for training and is a promising alternative to data-reliant deep learning techniques. The proposed technique optimizes parameters (variational and kernel-based) of the Gaussian process to determine the allowed region within the FOV limits by means of stochastic selection of functional points (pseudoinput) and tuning of threshold values. We have tested the proposed technique in experiments performed under different environmental conditions, such as various road and traffic conditions and diverse weather and illumination conditions. The results verify the efficacy of the proposed technique in diverse weather conditions for finding a drivable path for a self-driving vehicle, with the additional benefits of requiring only a low-cost apparatus and providing coverage of a long distance range.

Modern vehicles communicate data to and from sensors, actuators, and electronic control units (ECUs) using Controller Area Network (CAN) bus, which operates on differential signaling. An autonomous ECU responsible for the execution of decision commands to an autonomous vehicle is developed by assimilating the information from the CAN bus. The conventional way of parsing the decision commands is motion planning, which uses a path tracking algorithm to evaluate the decision commands. This study focuses on designing a robust controller using behavioral cloning and motion planning of autonomous vehicle using a deep learning framework. In the first part of this study, we explore the pipeline of parsing decision commands from the path tracking algorithm to the controller and proposed a neural network-based controller (N²C) using behavioral cloning. The proposed network predicts throttle, brake, and torque when trained with the manual driving data acquired from the CAN bus. The efficacy of the proposed method is demonstrated by comparing the accuracy with the Proportional-Derivative-Integral (PID) controller in conjunction with the path tracking algorithm (pure pursuit and model predictive control based path follower). The second part of this study complements N²C, in which an end-to-end neural network for predicting the speed and steering angle is proposed with image data as an input. The performance of the proposed frameworks are evaluated in real-time and on the Udacity dataset, showing better metric scores in the former and reliable prediction in the later case when compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

A frequent cause of auto accidents is disregarding the proximal traffic of an ego-vehicle during lane changing. Presumably, in a split-second-decision situation we may prevent an accident by predicting the intention of a driver before her action onset using the neural signals data, meanwhile building the perception of surroundings of a vehicle using optical sensors. The prediction of an intended action fused with the perception can generate an instantaneous signal that may replenish the driver’s ignorance about the surroundings. This study examines electromyography (EMG) signals to predict intention of a driver along perception building stack of an autonomous driving system (ADS) in building an advanced driving assistant system (ADAS). EMG are classified into left-turn and right-turn intended actions and lanes and object detection with camera and Lidar are used to detect vehicles approaching from behind. A warning issued before the action onset, can alert a driver and may save her from a fatal accident. The use of neural signals for intended action prediction is a novel addition to camera, radar and Lidar based ADAS systems. Furthermore, the study demonstrates efficacy of the proposed idea with experiments designed to classify online and offline EMG data in real-world settings with computation time and the latency of communicated warnings.

We investigate the application of ByteTrack in the realm of multiple object tracking. ByteTrack, a simple tracking algorithm, enables the simultaneous tracking of multiple objects by strategically incorporating detections with a low confidence threshold. Conventionally, objects are initially associated with high confidence threshold detections. When the association between objects and detections becomes ambiguous, ByteTrack extends the association to lower confidence threshold detections. One notable drawback of the existing ByteTrack approach is its reliance on a fixed threshold to differentiate between high and low-confidence detections. In response to this limitation, we introduce a novel and adaptive approach. Our proposed method entails a dynamic adjustment of the confidence threshold, leveraging insights derived from overall detections. Through experimentation, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our adaptive confidence threshold technique while maintaining running time compared to ByteTrack.