Already today, Lane Assist and Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) ensure greater safety when driving on motorways and A-roads. In the city, however, automated driving functions are a completely different challenge. The hurdles are much higher there. In order to overcome them, Volkswagen has joined forces with IBM, the Technical Universities of Cluj-Napoca, Prague, and ETH Zurich within the ‘UP-Drive’ project funded by the European Commission. See the full story here.
The UP-Drive brochure is available here.
The results from the latest research results on Visual Localization from ETHZ as part of the UP-Drive project has been featured by TechXplore. More detail can be found from the link below. Link
A pose-graph map with visual landmarks is created from tracking local BRISK features on four fish-eye cameras mounted on the vehicle. Subsequent loop-closure detection, pose-graph relaxation and Bundle Adjustment generates a geometrically consistent map. Through offline localization of further datasets, the map can incorporate multiple sessions and cover a wide spectrum of appearance conditions. The resulting multi-session map can then be used for visual localization across weather and seasonal change in the long-term.