Building an environment map around the Prolab2 vehicle using a controllable range sensor

The Prolab2 vehicle is the demonstrator for the French ProArt project, which aims at producing a driver's assistant system to increase safety on the roads. The complete system consists of several visual sensors mounted on the car which provide images to various image processing modalities. The information provided by this processing is passed to a data fusion module which generates a complete environment map, which in turn is passed to the copilot system which interprets the perceived environment for possible danger. Alarm, advisory or assistance messages are then passed to the driver via visual and audible means. This paper deals with one of the sensors on the Prolab2 vehicle, the telemetry sensor, and the data fusion module. First the individual sub-systems are described, followed by details of their connection, and finally some experimental results are presented that show the utility of both sub-systems.