My PhD and the two following years of
Post-Doctoral position
I prepared my PhD
thesis in the ICARE
project-team of INRIA
Sophia-Antipolis. It was titled "Robust
localization of a vehicle in urban environment with a stereo-vision system ",
my supervisor was Patrick
Rives.
My PhD was funded by the CyberCars
consortium, which aims to define the future transportation systems in
downtown areas by introducing the concept of vehicle-sharing.
Indeed, due to their expansion, high density cities might not
allow a private car for each inhabitant. The European Communauty
has decided to group the main european laboratories in robotics to
develop the Cybercar, a mobile robot which will improve the quality of
life in
our urban environments. The final goal was the creation of an
automatic, safe, silent and environmently friendly vehicle which will
represent a new alternative between the public transports
and the non-motorized ones.
Most of us have already seen unmanned vehicles running along highways
or restricted roads. In fact, these experimentations represent the
civil applications of all the recent research on mobile robots. In
outdoor applications, all mobile robots use a GPS system to locate
their pose. To obtain reliable GPS data, the receptors require free
space that can rarely be found in urban environments: the facades
generally obstruct the reception of satellite signals.
My work consisted of finding a solution to the loss of GPS data in
streets to finally locate a mobile robot. The urban environment is
certainly one of the most complex environments to locate a mobile
robot.
The complexity of such scenes comes from the number of dynamical
elements (vehicles, pedestrians) and the technical and financial
impossibility of using dead-reckogning systems for long path following.
I had thus been developing since october 2001 a vision-based method.
Vision systems are particularly weel-adapted to my application and
do not require the modification of the environment.
The main assumptions I made are:
- the road is considered as locally planar and have
parallel
boundaries,
- the high-frame rate of the camera induces a small
motion of
the features,
- the image foreground (first meters before the
vehicle) is
generally free from obstacles.
The proposed method allows an estimation of the motion of a vehicle in
the
difficult conditions of urban traffic. The use of a stereo rig allows
us to reject most features which do not lie on the road
plane. The algorithm can cope with most obstructions of the field of
view for example the crossing of pedestrians.
I joined the Centre
de
Robotique of Ecole des Mines
de Paris in september 2005 to
pursue my thesis works on Computer Vision dedicated to Intelligent
Transport Systems. I have been spliting my time between Ecole des
Mines
and INRIA
which formed in december 2005 the Joint Research
Unit La Route
Automatisée. For september 2006 to august 2007, I pursued my
works in IMARA
of INRIA Paris/Rocquencourt.