Apr 27, 2012 - world through such techniques as laser, radar, LIDAR, ... Review of the Book Autonomous Ground Vehicles. Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MITS.2012.2189993 ... He received his Mechanical Engineering Diploma from the.
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Review of the Book Autonomous Ground Vehicles
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utonomous vehicles will in all probability dominate the roads in the near future and will provide the drivers with extreme safety and assistance features, such as computer vision/ sensing abilities, accident warnings, safer lane changing, parking assistance, collision avoidance technologies, optimal routing, vehicle to vehicle communication, communication with ground infrastructures and others. An autonomous vehicle is defined as “a motor vehicle that uses artificial intelligence, sensors and global positioning system coordinates to drive itself without the active intervention of a human operator”. Autonomous vehicles sense the world through such techniques as laser, radar, LIDAR, GPS, computer vision (single camera or stereo vision) and RFID. Advanced control systems interpret the information to identify appropriate navigation paths, as well as obstacles and relevant signage. Autonomous vehicles typically update their maps based on sensory input, so that they can navigate through uncharted environments. This very new and ambitious book presents the most critical topics in the field nowadays.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MITS.2012.2189993 Date of publication: 27 April 2012
Title: Autonomous Ground Vehicles Authors: Umit Ozguner, Tankut Acarman, and Keith Redmill ISBN/Press/Year: 978-1-60807-192-0 Artech House 2011 Price: £85.00 WWW link: http://www. artechhouse.com/AutonomousGround-Vehicles/b/2225.aspx
Authored by U. Ozguner, T. Acarman and K. Redmill, Autonomous Ground Vehicles is a very ambitious book that provides a fresh look in the field of intelligent vehicles, focusing mainly on basic autonomous control and feedback
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for stopping and steering ground vehicles. Throughout the text, examples are provided from the numerous vehicles developed by the authors and their experience from participating in many national and international projects, challenges and demonstration events. The book covers sensors and sensor fusion to percept vehicle motion and surrounding objects and present how an autonomous vehicle is an unmanned (in terms of driving and decision process) vehicle that can fulfill the human transportation capabilities of a traditional car and can also sense its environment and navigate on its own. Autonomous Ground Vehicles begins with an introductory chapter that defines the background of autonomy in cars, the components of this autonomy and some notes on the developments of the past 30 years. Chapter 2 is another introductory chapter that provides an overview of the dynamics and control issues that are addressed in more detail in following chapters. It is a chapter useful for electrical and computer engineering students as it deals with the basic dynamics and physics principles behind application issues. Chapter 3 describes a common architecture applied in most autonomous vehicles and a hybrid
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systems model as a common setting for designing and analyzing high-level control issues. The common architecture provides a setting to understand
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Reviewer: Christos-Nikolaos Anagnostopoulos Christos-Nikolaos E. Anagnostopoulos was born in Athens, Greece in 1975. He received his Mechanical Engineering Diploma from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) in 1998, and the Ph.D. degree from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Dpt., NTUA in 2002. From 2008, he serves the University of the Aegean as Assistant Professor in the Cultural Technology and Communication Department. He is a member of the Greek chamber of Engineers and member of IEEE. His research interests include image processing, computer vision, neural networks and intelligence transportation systems applications. He has published more than 110 papers in journals and conferences, in the above subjects as well as other related fields in informatics. He also serves as associate editor for the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Magazine.
the software and hardware interactions. The hybrid system framework provides a unified approach to model the requisite “decision making” in the autonomous vehicle. Chapter 4 introduces the different sensor characteristics and their utilization and discusses sensor fusion approaches for autonomous vehicles. This important chapter presents vehicle internal state sensing issues (such as GPS and inertial measurements), external world sensing (radar, LIDAR, image sensors), sensor fusion and estimation of data, as well as helpful examples involving off-road and on-road vehicles. The chapter concludes by addressing the task of situational awareness, which means knowledge of the vehicle state, the prevailing driving scenario and its surroundings. Chapter 5 discusses and develops the control issues that were introduced in Chapter 2. Specifically, the book overviews critical issues such as cruise control, Antilock Brake Systems (ABS), steering control, lane following and control in parking scenarios. Chapter 6 provides an overview and introduction to maps based on GPS, the use of those maps and the related path planning issues that include examples
of heuristic search and cost functions from real-world projects. Chapter 7 is a synopsis of vehicleto-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication tasks and their relevance in autonomous vehicles. The chapter includes advanced topics such as Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs), Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs) and Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC). The chapter ends with a very interesting section on potential applications in autonomous vehicles that include adaptive cruise control in vehicle platoons, traffic/ lane merging and urban driving scenarios with Stop-and-Go traffic. The authors conclude their book in Chapter 8 that provides a discussion with some open problems, indicating that driver modeling is also a very important parameter that is usually is not granted the appropriate consideration. Concluding this short review, I have to notice that Autonomous Ground Vehicles is a must-read title for scientists, researchers and practitioners in the field of Intelligent Vehicles and Intelligent Transportation Systems.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MITS.2012.2189996
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