LiDAR Based Negative Obstacle Detection for Field Autonomous Land Vehicles

AbstractNegative obstacles for field autonomous land vehicles ALVs refer to ditches, pits, or terrain with a negative slope, which will bring risks to vehicles in travel. This paper presents a feature fusion based algorithm FFA for negative obstacle detection with LiDAR sensors. The main contributions of this paper are fourfold: 1 A novel three-dimensional 3-D LiDAR setup is presented. With this setup, the blind area around the vehicle is greatly reduced, and the density of LiDAR data is greatly improved, which are critical for ALVs. 2 On the basis of the proposed setup, a mathematical model of the point distribution of a single scan line is deduced, which is used to generate ideal scan lines. 3 With the mathematical model, an adaptive matching filter based algorithm AMFA is presented to implement negative obstacle detection. Features of simulated obstacles in each scan line are employed to detect the real negative obstacles. They are supposed to match with features of the potential real obstacles. 4 Grounded on AMFA algorithm, a feature fusion based algorithm is proposed. FFA algorithm fuses all the features generated by different LiDARs or captured at different frames. Bayesian rule is adopted to estimate the weight of each feature. Experimental results show that the performance of the proposed algorithm is robust and stable. Compared with the state-of-the-art techniques, the detection range is improved by 20%, and the computing time is reduced by an order of two magnitudes. The proposed algorithm had been successfully applied on two ALVs, which won the champion and the runner-up in the "Overcome Danger 2014" ground unmanned vehicle challenge of China.