Introduction to autonomous navigation techniques for intelligent vehicles

An autonomous intelligent vehicle is a robotized vehicle with decision-making and action capabilities, capable of carrying out tasks or missions assigned to it on roads open to public traffic, without the intervention of a human driver, or with minimal intervention. The adjective "intelligent" refers to intelligent transportation systems. The main classes are autonomous shuttles or autonomous cars, although trucks and buses are also vehicles that can benefit from autonomous navigation functionalities.

The first groundbreaking work was carried out in the 1980s with the "Navlab" prototypes at Carnegie-Mellon University in the USA. Europe was quick to take an interest, with the European Prometheus program (1987-1996). This work led to many innovations in terms of driver assistance. It was in the 2000s that several American challenges from DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) in 2004, 2005 and 2007 demonstrated that the technology was capable of producing "autonomous vehicles" with no one on board. Since the early 2010s, we have seen increasingly accomplished demonstrations that have left their mark on the field, such as the Intercontinental autonomous challenge at the University of Parma, which saw several vehicles take part in the Shanghai World Expo in 2010. At the same time, Google launched its Self-Driving Car project under the Waymo brand, which in 2020 will be in its fifth generation. Then, in 2014, German automaker Daimler drove 100 km with very little intervention from the safety driver at an event to celebrate the historic journey of Bertha Benz . Although many other examples could be cited, we can see that passenger cars are gradually becoming autonomous vehicles, i.e. they are capable of taking control of the actuators usually handled by the driver, whose role, in certain driving tasks, becomes that of a supervisor.

It has to be said that the autonomous vehicle can provide answers to societal expectations: road safety, driving comfort, repetitive and boring situations, better use of time spent traveling, improved traffic flow, optimization of on-board energy and infrastructure use, reduced journey times, improved mobility for the elderly or people with disabilities, etc. There is also a political will, since in April 2016, the European Union (EU) established the Amsterdam Declaration (a commitment by EU member states to work towards common rules and standards to enable autonomous vehicles on European roads).

In mobile robotics, autonomy depends mainly on three factors:

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