Autonomous Navigation of Structured City Roads

Autonomous road following is a domain which spans a range of complexity from p r l y defmed, unmarked dirt roads to well defined, well marked, highly structured highways. The YARF system (for Yet Another Road Follower) is designed to operate in the middle of this range of complexity, driving on laban streets. Our research program has focused on the use of featureand situation-specific segmentation techniques driven by an explicit model of the appearance and geometry of the road features in the environment. We rtport results in robust detection of white and yellow painted stripes; fitting a mad model to detected feature locations to determine vehicle position and local mad geometry: and automatic location of road features in an initial image. We also describe w planned extensions to include intersection navigation.