A Modular, Hybrid System Architecture for Autonomous, Urban Driving

Autonomous navigation in urban environments inevitably leads to having to switch between various, sometimes conflicting control tasks. Sting Racing, a collaboration between Georgia Tech and SAIC, has developed a modular control architecture for this purpose and this paper describes the operation and definition of this architecture through so-called nested hybrid automata. We show how to map the requirements associated with the DARPA Urban Grand Challenge onto these nested automata and illustrate their operation through a number of experimental results.