British engineers say they have developed a new software system for making regular cars into driverless vehicles.
The system, called Selenium, can take in data from visual cameras, laser scanners, or radar systems. It then uses a series of algorithms to establish where 'it' is, what surrounds it, and how to move. As it gradually acquires data about the routes along which a vehicle is driven, it learns how to react by analysing the way its human driver acts.
The software was developed by a company called Oxbotica, a spin-out from Oxford University's Department of Engineering Science and its creators hope that it will ultimately be used not just to control autonomous cars, but warehouse robots, forklifts, and self-driving public transport vehicles.
"When you buy your autonomous car and drive off the lot, it will know nothing," said Professor Ingmar Posner from the Department of Engineering Science and co-founder of Oxbotica.
"But at some point it will decide that it knows where it is, that its perception system has been trained by the way you’ve been driving, and it can then offer autonomy."
He said the software provides two primary functions: localise the vehicle in space, and perceive what’s happening around it.
"Based on those two feeds, a central planner can determine how the car should move. Both localisation and perception systems rely on sensors dotted about the vehicle, the choice of which depends on application: a warehouse forklift may use just use cheap cameras, while a car could make use of all kinds of sensors," he said.
"‘Selenium can compare on-the-fly sensor readings with those stored away in prior maps from previous journeys in similar conditions. If you take it out in the snow and it’s not seen it before, it keeps the ideas of snowy-ness around for the next time. Then it can identify image features, such as details on buildings or placement of street furniture, to localise the vehicle in the wider world. Meanwhile laser data, due to its high resolution, can be used to more accurately localise the car, especially in low visibility conditions when cameras can falter."
[An Oxbotica car using the Selenium software. Photo: Oxbotica]
Transport and infrastructure will be a major topic of discussion at the Australian Engineering Conference 2016 in Brisbane on November 23-25.