Vision-based Automated Vehicle Guidance: the experience of the ARGO vehicle

This paper presents and discusses the 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 computer vision system that allows to extract road and environmental information from the acquired scene; it has been demonstrated to drive autonomously on a number of different road and environmental conditions. 1 The ARGO Autonomous 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. ARGO, a Lancia Thema 2000 passenger car (figure 1), is equipped with a vision system that allows to extract road and environmental information from the acquired scene and to drive autonomously under different road conditions.