Abstract:
Operation in urban environments creates unique challenges for research in autonomous
ground vehicles. Due to the presence of tall trees and buildings in close proximity to
traversable areas, GPS outage is likely to be frequent and physical hazards pose real threats
to autonomous systems. In this paper, we describe a novel autonomous platform developed by
the Sydney-Berkeley Driving Team for entry into the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge competition.
We report empirical results analyzing the performance of the vehicle while navigating
a 560-meter test loop multiple times in an actual urban setting with severe GPS outage. We
show that our system is robust against failure of global position estimates and can reliably
traverse standard two-lane road networks using vision for localization.
