Fast forward: Developing future autonomous driving now

Enabling the future of autonomous transportation by significantly reducing product development time is the shared goal of three presentations to be made on Thursday, Nov. 30 in a free webinar, “High Accuracy for Autonomous Driving.”

The speakers will show how they employ post-processing software to generate accurate and reliable ground reference solutions in vehicle testing. The software enables evaluating potential sensor suites, benchmarking solutions, and generating high-definition maps.

Post-processing the data from autonomous vehicle tests under varying environmental conditions that mirror real-world situations can mitigate GNSS error sources (satellite clock & orbital error, and ionospheric & tropospheric delay); establish an ultra-precise ground truth reference for testing; compare and contrast different sensor packages tested onboard the vehicle; produce customized data formats for exporting information; compare real-time and post-processed quality; transform and translate data between different locations and reference frames; and revisit tests through export to Google Earth. The speakers will show how post-processing forward and back can lead to as much as 40 percent data accuracy improvement.

The software package, Inertial Explorer, offers this capability, whether lower-grade or high-end inertial sensors are employed.

Speakers in the free webinar are:

Steven Waslander, associate professor at the University of Waterloo, heads a project collecting 1,000 km of data in all-weather conditions for a new public road driving dataset focused on autonomous driving challenges. He directs the Waterloo Autonomous Vehicle Laboratory (WAVELab), extending the state of the art in autonomous drones and autonomous driving through advances in localization and mapping, object detection and tracking, integrated planning and control methods and multi-robot coordination.

Terry Lamprecht, director of products at AutonomouStuff, a supplier of components, services and software that enable autonomy, will discuss verifying proper installation, and creating a baseline data set to benchmark against data collected on autonomous vehicles in real-time.

Natasha Wong Ken, product manager at Waypoint, will give a high-level technical overview of post-processing techniques and settings, including forward and reverse processing, tightly vs. loosely coupled, PPP vs. differential, and more.

Registration for the November 30 webinar is free. For those not able to attend the live broadcast, all audio and presentation slide components can be downloaded after air date for viewing at convenience.