Russian unmanned car StarLine drove from St. Petersburg to Kazan
The StarLine NPO team developed the StarLine smart unmanned vehicle, the project is being implemented according to a program of mastering five levels of autonomy. At the moment, the robotic mobile reached level 3, in May 2018, it was tested in field conditions, covering a distance of several tens of kilometers. Now the robot has covered more than 2,500 kilometers, having traveled from St. Petersburg to Kazan.
The drone, according to the developers, is able to navigate the road situation. He can follow a given route, keep a distance, read the markings and signs, bypass obstacles and urgently slow down.
When driving on the highway, the robo-mobile developed a speed of about 80 km / h, improving its result at 40 km / h. According to project managers, on the road, the system behaved stably and reliably, it coped with both the poor quality of the markup, or its complete absence, and one-way traffic.
The car has two automated control modes. The first is holding in the lane. Thanks to the installed sensors, sensors and cameras in the roboMobile, they can recognize the marking, “understand the lane”, and recognize the traffic situation. The incoming data is used by the control system, which calculates the route, directing the car through it.
As for the second mode, it allows the car to move in conditions of almost complete absence of marking, in bad weather conditions, in conditions of a large amount of interference and unforeseen factors.
In order to move the car without interference, the developers of the company create a high-precision map of the road with waypoints - they are generated according to the principle of the GPS-navigator. The location of the car on the map is determined using a high-precision satellite navigation receiver, inertial navigation system and odometry.
In the process of driving on the highway, the car analyzes the situation around itself, recognizes obstacles, makes decisions about its own "behavior" model. In order for a computer system to be oriented in its surroundings, lidar, radar, a vision system are necessary.
“Now the car is moving along the highway without using a road map and route planner. If you need to change the direction of movement - at the intersection, at exits and exits from highways and other maneuvers - the system requires the intervention of the operator. To solve this problem, during the trip we collected data to build a road map and automate these actions, ”said Andrei Alekseev, project development engineer.
It should be noted that the robotic car did not work in automatic mode all the time - in order to ensure traffic safety, the operator controlled the most difficult sections of the expensive ones.
The most difficult moments in the process of moving along the route were the recognition of the roadway and work with big data. Project participants reported that in some areas, the mobile could not correctly recognize certain areas of the roadway. With regard to the processing of large amounts of data, due to the high load on the equipment, data processing was periodically performed insufficiently quickly.
In general, autonomous machine control technologies are being improved literally every day, and the number of companies conducting research in this area is increasing. One of the successful projects is robotaxifrom Daimler AG and Bosch. The project participants are confident in the capabilities of the robots so much that they decided to start the service of robotic taxi in the second half of 2019.
At the moment, the service will work only in a specific region of San Jose, California, USA. And the most interesting thing is that the trips will be free for passengers - thus, the company will run in their cars in the field. Of course, the safety of these vehicles has already been raised to a fairly high level, which allows us not to worry too much about the quality of driving the autopilot on public roads.
Among domestic projects can be identifiedalso the launch of an unmanned taxi on the territory of Skolkovo. The service is provided by Yandex. Initially, a taxi will be available only to residents of the innovation center, and the order is made through the Yandex.Taxi application. At first, travel will be free for passengers.