Safe Robot Driving

The Navlab group at Carnegie Mellon University has a long history of development of automated vehicles and intelligent systems for driver assistance. The earlier work of the group concentrated on road following, cross-country driving, and obstacle detection. The new focus is on short-range sensing, to look all around the vehicle for safe driving. The current system uses video sensing, laser rangefinders, a novel light-stripe rangefinder, software to process each sensor individually, and a map-based fusion system. The complete system has been demonstrated on the Navlab 11 vehicle for monitoring the environment of a vehicle driving through a cluttered urban environment, detecting and tracking fixed objects, moving objects, pedestrians, curbs, and roads. 2 The need for 360 degree safeguarding Robot driving has concentrated on forward-looking sensing, for road following and obstacle detection. This is an appropriate first step, but real deployment of mobile robots will require additional sensing and reasoning to surround the robot with safeguard sensors and systems. Our group is currently building short-range sensing to surround vehicles t