Building a Winning Self-Driving Car in Six Months

Keenan Burnett; Andreas Schimpe; Sepehr Samavi; Mona Gridseth; Chengzhi Winston Liu; Qiyang Li; Zachary Kroeze; Angela P. Schoellig

arXiv · 1811.01273

Building a Winning Self-Driving Car in Six Months

Keenan Burnett·Andreas Schimpe·Sepehr Samavi·Mona Gridseth·Chengzhi Winston Liu·Qiyang Li·Zachary Kroeze·Angela P. Schoellig

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Abstract

The SAE AutoDrive Challenge is a three-year competition to develop a Level 4 autonomous vehicle by 2020. The first set of challenges were held in April of 2018 in Yuma, Arizona. Our team (aUToronto/Zeus) placed first. In this paper, we describe our complete system architecture and specialized algorithms that enabled us to win. We show that it is possible to develop a vehicle with basic autonomy features in just six months relying on simple, robust algorithms. We do not make use of a prior map. Instead, we have developed a multi-sensor visual localization solution. All of our algorithms run in real-time using CPUs only. We also highlight the closed-loop performance of our system in detail in several experiments.

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Keenan Burnett, Andreas Schimpe, Sepehr Samavi, Mona Gridseth, Chengzhi Winston Liu, Qiyang Li, Zachary Kroeze, Angela P. Schoellig. 2018-11-03. Building a Winning Self-Driving Car in Six Months. https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.01273

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