Lessons learned after more than 1000 km in an autonomous shuttle guided by vision

This article presents a large scale and long duration experiment as part of the French FUI VipaFleet project. A driverless shuttle has been operated for three month on an industrial site, totaling nearly 1500 km of autonomous travel and 300 passengers transported. The localization relies mainly on a multi camera system and a visual SLAM algorithm. Besides the vision algorithms themselves, this article develops the practical aspects of a large scale experiment and the lessons learned from this experience.