Perception and Change Detection For Military Drivers
The Perception Capabilities Demonstrator lets
soldiers view their
vehicle's surroundings from any perspective.
Rough, unpaved roads with ruts, holes and wash-outs. Narrow, steep, winding roads. Roadside bombs. This is what soldiers face day and night while driving missions in Afghanistan and Iraq. NREC and Oshkosh Corporation engineers want to help them handle these hazards. They’ve partnered to build the Perception Capabilities Demonstrator, an innovative driver assistance and change detection system.
The Perception Capabilities Demonstrator fuses panoramic video and laser range scans with global position system (GPS) and inertial navigation system (INS) data to create a detailed, three-dimensional image of a vehicle’s surroundings. Screens mounted in the dashboard and front seat area give driver and passenger a 2D panoramic view and a 3D, 360° view of the terrain around the vehicle.
The passenger uses a video game-style controller to pan and zoom across the image. Being able to view the terrain and vehicle from literally any perspective enhances the passenger’s situational awareness. Passenger and driver also can view the 3D point data either as true colorized points or with colors assigned according to height difference. This assists in night driving in blackout conditions, since it shows hazards that would otherwise be hidden in the dark.
Imagine a fleet of vehicles equipped with the Perception Capabilities Demonstrator, all mapping the terrain along primary and secondary supply routes. The data they collect can be merged to create a route network for missions that soldiers perform on a daily basis. This has three advantages.
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When soldiers are driving the same route over and over again, the system can highlight the changes along the road ahead of them and act as an early warning of potential hazards. The display can automatically switch back and forth between the live image and stored images from a previous traverse, helping soldiers to spot dangers such as improvised explosive devices (IEDs). |
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Soldiers can learn new driving routes by reviewing previously recorded terrain maps (whether recorded an hour, a day, a week, or a month before). This also improves their situational awareness and helps them to spot changes along the route and identify hazards.
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New troops entering a theater can pre-drive supply routes and gain awareness of the terrain where they will be operating before their first mission. |
NREC and Oshkosh took the Perception Capabilities Demonstrator on the road to the NDIA Ground Vehicle Systems Engineering and Technology Symposium (August 18 – 20) in Detroit and the TARDEC Robotics Rodeo in Fort Hood (August 31 – Sept. 3). Soldiers liked the change detection feature and the 3D view of the vehicle’s surroundings, and gave plenty of feedback on ways to improve the system.
The Perception Capabilities Demonstrator uses technologies that were adapted from NREC’s UPI program. Future work will focus on improving localization in places with limited or no GPS availability.
The display can switch between live and recorded terrain maps, helping soldiers to spot changes in the environment that indicate hazards. In this example, the cylinder circled in red (the "Live" picture) was not present on an earlier trip (the "Recorded" picture), and might be an IED.
NREC's Cliff Olmstead shows the Perception
Capabilities Demonstrator to Second Lt. Antonia
Carreon during the Robotics Rodeo at Fort Hood.
(Photo courtesy of Killeen Daily Herald.)
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