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SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) plays a key role in autonomous driving. Recently, 4D Radar has attracted widespread attention because it breaks through the limitations of 3D millimeter wave radar and can simultaneously detect the distance, velocity, horizontal azimuth and elevation azimuth of the target with high resolution. However, there are few studies on 4D Radar in SLAM. In this paper, RI-FGO, a 4D Radar-Inertial SLAM method based on Factor Graph Optimization, is proposed. The RANSAC (Random Sample Consensus) method is used to eliminate the dynamic obstacle points from a single scan, and the ego-motion velocity is estimated from the static point cloud. A 4D Radar velocity factor is constructed in GTSAM to receive the estimated velocity in a single scan as a measurement and directly integrated into the factor graph. The 4D Radar point clouds of consecutive frames are matched as the odometry factor.

Multi-Target tracking is a central aspect of modeling the surrounding environment of autonomous vehicles. Automotive millimeter-wave radar is a necessary component in the autonomous driving system. One of the biggest advantages of radar is it measures the velocity directly. Another big advantage is that the radar is less influenced by environmental conditions. It can work day and night, in rainy or snowy conditions. In the expressway scenario, the forward-looking radar can generate multiple objects, to properly track the leading vehicle or neighbor-lane vehicle, a multi-target tracking algorithm is required. How to associate the track and the measurement or data association is an important question in a multi-target tracking system. This paper applies the nearest-neighbor method to solve the data association problem and uses an extended Kalman filter to update the state of the track.

Positioning system is a key module of autonomous driving. As for LiDAR SLAM system, it faces great challenges in scenarios where there are repetitive and sparse features. Without loop closure or measurements from other sensors, odometry match errors or accumulated errors cannot be corrected. This paper proposes a construction method of LiDAR anchor constraints to improve the robustness of the SLAM system in the above challenging environment. We propose a robust anchor extraction method that adaptively extracts suitable cylindrical anchors in the environment, such as tree trunks, light poles, etc. Skewed tree trunks are detected by feature differences between laser lines. Boundary points on cylinders are removed to avoid misleading. After the appropriate anchors are detected, a factor graph-based anchor constraint construction method is designed. Where direct scans are made to anchor, direct constraints are constructed.

Autonomous driving related technologies have become a hot topic in academia and industry. Planning control is one of the core technologies of autonomous driving, which is conducive to vehicles safe and efficient driving. This paper proposes a novel optimal speed control algorithm, which considers the power system's energy consumption, the speed limit on the road, and the safe distance of the vehicle in front. An optimal speed control model of “From battery to wheel” energy consumption is established by constructing a performance index function based on the best-fitting formula of motor power, motor speed and torque. Based on the optimal control principle, the fourth-order ordinary differential equation of the speed control model is established, based on the indirect adjoining approach, the speed control model under the restriction of the road speed limit and safe distance of the preceding vehicle is derived and the analytical expression is obtained.

With the popularity of automated vehicles, the future mixed traffic flow contains automated vehicles with different degrees of intelligence developed by other manufacturers. Therefore, simulating the interaction behavior of automated vehicles with varying levels of intelligence is crucial for testing and evaluating autonomous driving systems. Since the algorithm of traffic vehicles with various intelligence levels is difficult to obtain, it leads to hardships in quantitatively characterizing their interaction behaviors. Therefore, this paper designs a new automated vehicle test platform to solve the problem. The intelligent vehicle testbed with multiple personalized in-vehicle control units in the loop consists of three parts: 1. Multiple controllers in the loop to simulate the behavior of traffic vehicles；2. The central console applies digital twin technology to share the same traffic scenario between the tested vehicle and the traffic vehicle, creating a mixed traffic flow. 3.

As one of the key technologies in autonomous driving, the lateral planning module guides the lateral movement during the driving process. An integrated lateral planning module should consider the non-holonomic constraints of a vehicle, the optimization of the generated trajectory and the applicability to various scenarios. However, the current lateral planning methods can only meet parts of these requirements. In order to satisfy all the performance requirements above, a novel Potential Field (PF) based lateral planning method is proposed in this paper. Firstly, a PF model is built to describe the potential risk of the traffic entities, including the obstacles, road boundaries and lines. The potential fields of these traffic entities are determined by their properties and the traffic regulations. Secondly, the planning algorithm is presented, which comprises three modules: state prediction, state search and trajectory generation.

A rapid path-planning algorithm that generates drivable paths for an autonomous vehicle operating in structural road is proposed in this paper. Cubic B-spline curve is adopted to generating smooth path for continuous curvature and, more, parametric basic points of the spline is adjusted to controlling the curvature extremum for kinematic constraints on vehicle. Other than previous approaches such as inverse kinematics, model-based prediction postprocess approach or closed-loop forward simulation, using the kinematics model in each iteration of path for smoothing and controlling curvature leading to time consumption increasing, our method characterized the vehicle curvature constraint by the minimum length of segment line, which synchronously realized constraint and smooth for generating path. And Differ from the path of robot escaping from a maze, the intelligent vehicle traveling on road in structured environments needs to meet the traffic rules.

Image corruptions due to noise, blur, contrast change, etc., could lead to a significant performance decline of Deep Neural Networks (DNN), which poses a potential threat to DNN-based autonomous vehicles. Previous works attempted to explain corruption from a Fourier perspective. By comparing the absolute Fourier spectrum difference between corrupted images and clean images in the RGB color space, they regard the noise from some corruptions (Gaussian noise, defocus blur, etc.) as concentrating on the high-frequency components while others (contrast, fog, etc.) concentrate on the low-frequency components. In this work, we present a new perspective that unifies corruptions as noise from high frequency and thus propose an image augmentation algorithm to achieve a more robust performance against common corruptions. First, we notice the 1/fα statistical rule of the natural image's spectrum and the channels-wise differential sensitivity on the YCbCr color space of the Human Visual System.

Harmony-with-traffic refers to the ability of autonomous vehicles to maximize the driving benefits such as comfort, efficiency, and energy consumption of themselves and the surrounding traffic during interactive driving under traffic rules. In the test of harmony-with-traffic, one or more background vehicles that can respond to the driving behavior of the vehicle under test are required. For this purpose, the functional requirements of car-following model for harmony-with-traffic evaluation are analyzed from the dimensions of test conditions, constraints, steady state and dynamic response. Based on them, an interactive car-following model (ICFM) is developed. In this model, the concept of equivalent distance is proposed to transfer lateral influence to longitudinal. The calculation methods of expected speed are designed according to the different car-following modes divided by interaction object, reaction distance and equivalent distance.

Radar is playing more and important role in multiple object detection and tracking system due to the fact that Radar can not only determine the velocity instantly but also it is less influenced by environment conditions. However, Radar faces the problem that it has many detection clutter，false alarms and detection results are easily affected by the reflected echoes of road boundary in traffic scenes. Besides this, With the increase of the number of targets and the number of effective echoes, the number of interconnection matrices increases exponentially in joint probability data association, which will seriously affect the real-time and accuracy of high-speed scene algorithms.in the tracking system. So, A method of using millimeter wave radar to detect and fit the boundary guardrail of high-speed road is proposed, and the fitting results are applied to the vehicle detection and tracking system to improve the tracking accuracy.

Lane-keeping assist system (LKA) alerts the driver or intervenes in the driving when the vehicle deviates from the lane. But its effect is highly dependent on the driver’s acceptance. Distance to Lane Crossing (DTLC) and Time to Lane Crossing (TTLC) are two important factors to consider the danger level of the scenario, which are also two references for drivers to make decisions. At present, most of the functional design standards are based on these values, while they often differ for different vehicle movements. This study uses a driving robot to precisely control the test conditions and performs field tests on two advanced autonomous vehicles in National Intelligent Connected Vehicle (Shanghai) Pilot Zone. The test conditions are extended based on various test standards and the LKA performance of vehicles in the pre-experiment.

LiDAR and camera fusion have emerged as a promising approach for improving place recognition in robotics and autonomous vehicles. However, most existing approaches often treat sensors separately, overlooking the potential benefits of correlation between them. In this paper, we propose a Cross- Modality Module (CMM) to leverage the potential correlation of LiDAR and camera features for place recognition. Besides, to fully exploit potential of each modality, we propose a Local-Global Fusion Module to supplement global coarse-grained features with local fine-grained features. The experiment results on public datasets demonstrate that our approach effectively improves the average recall by 2.3%, reaching 98.7%, compared with simply stacking of LiDAR and camera.

In order to improve the robustness and stability of autonomous vehicle at high speed, a path tracking approach which combines front steering and differential braking is investigated in this paper. A bicycle model with 3-DOFs is established and a linear time-varying predictive model using front steering as its control input can be derived. Based on model predictive theory, the path tracking issue using linear time-varying model predictive control can be transformed into an online quadratic programming problem with constraints. The expected front steering angle can be obtained from online moving optimization. Then the direct yawing control is adopted to treat two types of differential braking control. The first one investigates steady-state gain of yaw rate in linear 2-DOFs vehicle model, and designs a stable differential braking controller which is based on reference yaw rate.

Lane change obstacle avoidance is a common driving scenario for autonomous vehicles. However, existing methods for lane change obstacle avoidance in vehicles decouple path and velocity planning, neglecting the coupling relationship between the path and velocity. Additionally, these methods often do not sufficiently consider the lane change behaviors characteristic of human drivers. In response to these challenges, this paper innovatively applies the Dynamic Movement Primitives (DMPs) algorithm to vehicle trajectory planning and proposes a real-time trajectory planning method that integrates DMPs and Artificial Potential Fields (APFs) algorithm (DMP-Fs) for lane change obstacle avoidance, enabling rapid coordinated planning of both path and velocity. The DMPs algorithm is based on the lane change trajectories of human drivers. Therefore, this paper first collected lane change trajectory samples from on-road vehicle experiments.

The on-ramp merging driving scenario is challenging for achieving the highest-level autonomous driving. Current research using reinforcement learning methods to address the on-ramp merging problem of automated vehicles (AVs) is mainly designed for a single AV, treating other vehicles as part of the environment. This paper proposes a control framework for cooperative on-ramp merging of multiple AVs based on multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL). This framework facilitates AVs on the ramp and adjacent mainline to learn a coordinate control policy for their longitudinal and lateral motions based on the environment observations. Unlike the hierarchical architecture, this paper integrates decision and control into a unified optimal control problem to solve an on-ramp merging strategy through MADRL.

The coordinated control of stability and steering systems in collision avoidance steering evasion has been widely studied in vehicle active safety area, but the studies are mainly aimed at autonomous vehicle without driver or conventional combustion engine vehicle. This paper focuses on the control of hybrid vehicle integrated with rear hub in emergency steering evasion situation, and considering the driver’s characteristics. First, the mathematics model of vehicle dynamics and driver has been given. Second, based on the planned steering evasion path, the model predictive control method is presented for achieving higher evasion path tracking accuracy under driver’s steering input. The prediction model includes an adaptive preview distance driver model and a vehicle dynamics model to predict the driver input and the vehicle trajectory.

With the development of autonomous driving, the penetration rate of autonomous vehicles on the road will continue to grow. As a result, the social cooperation ability of autonomous vehicles will have a great effect on the social acceptance of autonomous driving, which can be described as harmony with traffic. In order to research the evaluation method of the harmony with traffic, this paper proposes a subjective and objective mapping evaluation method based on the Mean Impact Value and Backpropagation (MIV-BP) Neural Network, with the merging vehicle on the expressway ramp as the research object. Firstly, by taking 16 original objective indexes obtained by theoretical analysis and the subjective evaluation results as input and output, respectively, the BP Neural Network model is constructed as a baseline model. Secondly, nine selected objective indexes are selected by the MIV method based on the baseline model.

The scenario-based test method is now drawing more and more attention in the field of the test for autonomous vehicles. The predefined scenarios are used in the safety verification and performance evaluation of autonomous vehicles. However, the traditional generation method for predefined scenarios is parameterized and open-looped, which makes it challenging to generate diverse and complex scenarios. It is critical when testing high-level autonomous vehicles to verify their reliability in multiple behavior transitions. In this paper, a generation method for the continuous scenario is proposed to realize a function-driven iteration of scenarios for autonomous driving systems (ADS). The method consists of a functional model of ADS and a formal description of abstract scenario.

Tracking vehicle trajectories is essential for autonomous vehicles and advanced driver-assistance systems to understand traffic environment and evaluate collision risk. In order to reduce the position deviation and fluctuation of tracking on-road vehicle by millimeter-wave radar (MMWR), an interactive multi-model Kalman filter (IMM-KF) tracking algorithm including data association and track management is proposed. In general, it is difficult to model the target vehicle accurately due to lack of vehicle kinematics parameters, like wheel base, uncertainty of driving behavior and limitation of sensor’s field of view. To handle the uncertainty problem, an interacting multiple model (IMM) approach using Kalman filters is employed to estimate multitarget’s states. Then the compensation of radar ego motion is achieved, since the original measurement is under the radar polar coordinate system.

Environmental perception is a crucial subsystem in autonomous vehicles. In order to build safe and efficient traffic transportation, several researches have been proposed to build accurate, robust and real-time perception systems. Camera and LiDAR are widely equipped on autonomous self-driving cars and developed with many algorithms in recent years. The fusion system of camera and LiDAR provides state-of the-art methods for environmental perception due to the defects of single vehicular sensor. Extrinsic parameter calibration is able to align the coordinate systems of sensors and has been drawing enormous attention. However, differ from spatial alignment of two sensors’ data, joint calibration of multi-sensors (more than two sensors) should balance the degree of alignment between each two sensors.