Road Boundaries Detection based on Modified Occupancy Grid Map Using Millimeter-wave Radar

Abstract

Road region detection is a hot spot research topic in autonomous driving field. It requires to give consideration to accuracy, efficiency as well as prime cost. In that, we choose millimeter-wave (MMW) Radar to fulfill road detection task, and put forward a novel method based on MMW which meets real-time requirement. In this paper, a dynamic and static obstacle distinction step is firstly conducted to estimate the dynamic obstacle interference on boundary detection. Then, we generate an occupancy grid map using modified Bayesian prediction to construct a 2D driving environment model based on static obstacles, while a clustering procedure is carried out to describe dynamic obstacles. Next, a Modified Random Sample Consensus (Modified RANSAC) algorithm is presented to estimate candidate road boundaries from static obstacle maps. Results of our experiments are presented and discussed at the end. Note that, all our experiments in this paper are run in real-time on an experimental UGV (unmanned ground vehicle) platform equipped with Continental ARS 408-21 radar.