Autonomous road vehicle navigation

Abstract This paper describes a new modular hardware design for an autonomous land vehicle, together with techniques for navigation and obstacle avoidance. A “bootstrap” algorithm is described which aligns the vehicle from an arbitrary starting point using the road's vanishing point. An algorithm to perform navigation along a structured road is then described. This is achieved by modelling the white lane-boundary marking using six parameters which are updated iteratively from frame to frame using a non-linear least-squares techniques. The obstacle-detection method is based on frame differencing. Using data from the vehicle odometry sensors, a motion-corrected version of the difference between frames is produced, in which objects projecting up from the ground plane are easily identified.