A mechanism to improve Stereo Vision Systems in automated heterogeneous platoons

Due to their low price and good quality, Stereo Vision Systems (SVS) are recently considered as a key factor to gather actual information about the object of interest. Today, automated highway systems (AHS) for urban and highway environment were developed without the use of a stereo vision system. In future, the application of AHS should be extended to unstructured environments (e.g. desert) and be adapted to heterogeneous vehicles. In this context, the stereo vision system could enable the platoon to be independent from environmental structure (e.g. lane markings) through its ability to detect, track, locate and recognize heterogeneous vehicles. So far, the need for high accuracy prevents SVS to be applied in automated heterogeneous platoon. In this paper a mechanism towards this is presented, where some behavioral properties have to be satisfied in terms of unstructured environment and heterogeneous platoons. Within a heterogeneous platoon, the back view of a preceding vehicle (BVPV) is considered as a reference point for the lateral and longitudinal control. The key idea of the proposed mechanism is to confirm that the distance of the BVPV can be extracted without depending on the movement of the preceding vehicle. Furthermore, the proposed mechanism has to ensure that features extracted from the back view are suitable to implement successfully the calibration process at around 10m distance. With the proposed SVS mechanism some of behavioral properties have to be satisfied in terms of unstructured environment and AHS. These properties are reliability, performance and robustness. Compared to other methods which use a SVS, the proposed mechanism distinguishes itself through adapting to dynamic environment and extracting the necessary features for the calibration process.