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OpenStreetMap-Based Autonomous Navigation With LiDAR Naive-Valley-Path Obstacle Avoidance

IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems

Miguel Ángel Muñoz-Bañón, Edison Velasco-Sánchez, Francisco A. Candelas, Fernando Torres
Group of Automation, Robotics and Computer Vision (AUROVA)
University of Alicante

Abstract

OpenStreetMaps (OSM) is currently studied as the environment representation for autonomous navigation. It provides advantages such as global consistency, a heavy-less map construction process, and a wide variety of road information publicly available. However, the location of this information is usually not very accurate locally. In this paper, we present a complete autonomous navigation pipeline using OSM information as environment representation for global planning. To avoid the flaw of local low-accuracy, we offer the novel LiDAR-based Naive-Valley-Path (NVP) method that exploits the concept of “valley” areas to infer the local path always furthest from obstacles. This behavior allows navigation always through the center of trafficable areas following the road’s shape independently of OSM error. Furthermore, NVP is a naive method that is highly sample-time-efficient. This time efficiency also enables obstacle avoidance, even for dynamic objects. We demonstrate the system’s robustness in our research platform BLUE, driving autonomously across the University of Alicante Scientific Park for more than 20 km with 0.24 meters of average error against the road’s center with a 19.8 ms of average sample time. Our vehicle avoids static obstacles in the road and even dynamic ones, such as vehicles and pedestrians.

Pipeline
Global map
Robot BLUE

(Left) OSM-Based autonomous navigation pipeline - (Center) Global graph extracted from OSM - (Right) BLUE robot (UGV), used for the experiments

BibTeX


        @article{munoz2022openstreetmap,
          title={Openstreetmap-based autonomous navigation with lidar naive-valley-path obstacle avoidance},
          author={Muñoz-Bañón, Miguel Ángel and Velasco-Sánchez, Edison and Candelas, Francisco A. and Torres, Fernando},
          journal={IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems},
          volume={23},
          number={12},
          pages={24428--24438},
          year={2022},
          doi={10.1109/TITS.2022.3208829},
          publisher={IEEE}
        }