Jean-Marc Blosseville

Visible light communications: Application to cooperation between vehicles and road infrastructures

The last couple of years, the vehicle industry tends to increase the performance of lights based on led technologies. Nowadays, led systems are used as a standard by motor vehicles manufacturers. Led lights present higher reliability and are more flexible regarding design or power adjustments. Furthermore, led systems are also very convenient for intensity modulation used in telecommunication fields. We developed a very simple data transmission system based on led lights which is highly robust for short or medium distances ± from a few meters up to 15 meters. This visible light communication is dedicated to the cooperation between vehicles and road infrastructures to enhance traffic security. This paper explains the choices and first results on the data transmission performances. In this paper, we present a first prototype of our system and experimental results.

A new robust control system with optimized use of the lane detection data for vehicle full lateral control under strong curvatures

In this work, we have proposed and implemented in our prototype vehicle a complete lateral control system that works with a good performance even for strong curvatures. The proposed system has important new features with respect to the known systems. While a lookahead distance linear with the speed is often proposed, we have proposed here a quadratic lookahead distance of the speed, that improved considerably the tracking of the lane in curves. A strategy to optimize the use of the information coming from the lane detection module is also proposed. The logics is, if we do not have optimal lane detection exactly in the desired lookahead distance, but in the proximities of this distance we can still control the vehicle with high accuracy. Finally, we have proposed a visual interface that alerts the driver in the case of a degradation in the lane detection. The driver can deactivate the lateral control whenever he wants by simply counteracting the system and an automatic reactivation of the system is provided under strict conditions on the vehicle positioning and on the quality of the lane detection

Time-to-line crossing and vehicle dynamics for lane departure avoidance

This paper analyses time-to-line crossing sensitivity with respect to the vehicle parameters. Both straight and curved vehicle paths are considered. An evaluation over a digitalized test track is performed. An observer for the road curvature estimation is also proposed. In this paper TLC computation is presented on the basis of geometric kinematic formula and dynamic trajectory prediction.

A robotic platform to evalute autonomous driving systems

The paper proposes an assessment framework in which two platforms are used, one is simulation based, the other, Robert, is a robot that carries out the basic control of actuators. Robert platform can be installed on any cars. Authors have completed those basic capabilities in one case with upper level control (path planning, upper control) to assess perception capabilities. Robert basic controllers have also been completed to evaluate full autonomous control capabilities, without the difficulty to maintain low level controllers.

From autonomous robotics toward autonomous cars

For decades, scientists have dreamed of building autonomous cars that can drive without a human driver. Progress in this kind of research recently received an increasing attention in car industries. There are many autonomous car models recently developed. However, they are still infancy since they still lack efficiency and reliability. To obtain efficient and reliable systems, the validation process plays an important role. Nowadays, the validation is strongly related to the number of kilometers of drive. Thus, simulation techniques are used before going into real world driving. We focused our work on developing a methodology to smothly move from simulation into real world car driving. We defined a versatile architecture that simplifies the evaluation of different types of algorithms. Several evaluation systems are shown and discussed.