The Experience of the ARGO Autonomous

This paper presents and discusses the rst results obtained by the GOLD (Generic Obstacle and Lane Detection) system as an automatic driver of ARGO. ARGO is a Lancia Thema passenger car equipped with a vision-based system that allows to extract road and environmental information from the acquired scene. By means of stereo vision, obstacles on the road are detected and localized, while the processing of a single monocular image allows to extract the road geometry in front of the vehicle. The generality of the underlying approach allows to detect generic obstacles (without constraints on shape, color, or symmetry) and to detect lane markings even in dark and in strong shadow conditions. The hardware system consists of a PC Pentium 200Mhz with MMX technology and a frame-grabber board able to acquire 3 b/w images simultaneously; the result of the processing (position of obstacles and geometry of the road) is used to drive an actuator on the steering wheel, while debug information are presented to the user on an on-board monitor and a led-based control panel. 1. THE ARGO VEHICLE ARGO is the experimental autonomous vehicle developed at the Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione of the University of Parma, Italy. It integrates the main results of the research conducted over the last few years on the algorithms and the architectures for vision based automatic road vehicles guidance. Thanks to the availability of the ARGO vehicle, a number of diierent solutions for autonomous navigation have been developed, tested and tuned, particularly for the basic functionalities of Obstacle Detection and Lane Detection. The most promising approaches for both functionalities have been integrated into the GOLD (Generic Obstacle and Lane Detection) system 1 which acts currently as the automatic driver of ARGO. ARGO is a Lancia Thema 2000 passenger car ((gure 1.a) equipped with a vision-based system that allows to extract road and environmental information from the acquired scene, and with diierent output devices used to test the automatic features. 1.1. The input Only passive sensors (cameras) are used on ARGO to sense the surrounding environment, since they ooer the possibility to acquire data in a non-invasive way, namely without altering the environment. Because of the large number of vehicles that could be moving simultaneously, this is a prominent advantage with respect to invasive ways of perceiving the environment, which could lead to an unacceptable pollution of the environment.