This paper describes an entire automated vehicle platform for software prototyping and demonstration. The project is build up with the cooperation of the Czech Technical University and Porsche Engineering Services company. The platform is based on a serial production car Porsche Panamera. The aim of this prototype is to close perception - planning - control loop and demonstrate it at a fully automated slalom ride. Besides the sensors already available in the stock Porsche Panamera car, our system is equipped with differential GPS, mono camera, and 16-layers LiDAR. The algorithms run on the NVIDIA TX2 platform, are integrated using Robotic Operating System (ROS) middleware and interface with the car ECUs via CAN and FlexRay buses. A Support Vector Machine with Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HoG) feature vectors from the camera image is used for cones classification. Cone localization is done relative to the car. It uses data from the camera and LiDAR. A Kalman filter derives accurate car odometry. It takes data from the GPS, car builtin accelerometer and actual speed and steers commands. The bicycle kinematic model is used to interconnect all of these pieces of information and for Kalman filter implementation. Clustering and filtering of all detected cones generate the cone map. Optimal trajectory planning respecting the car kinematics is crucial for the smooth slalom ride between the cones. A nonlinear quadratic optimization problem for this purpose is formulated and solved based on the bicycle model. Finally, the trajectory tracking control keeps the car on the planned slalom trajectory during the ride. Substantial work was devoted to experiments with a real vehicle and the fine - tuning of the system parameters. Validation of the system reveals interesting observations related to the precision, frequency and sensitivity of the system components and usability of ROS middleware for the autonomous driving tasks.

Ing. Jiří Záhora, Czech Technical University, CIIRC, CZECH REPUBLIC Prof. Zdeňek Hanzálek, Czech Technical University, CIIRC, CZECH REPUBLIC Dr. Michal Sojka, Czech Technical University, CIIRC, CZECH REPUBLIC