Expanding on our objective of bringing Level-5 autonomous driving in the world's most adversarial-complex-stochastic of traffic-dynamics and environmental conditions, we present autonomous driving in very dense fog at night, with negotiation of incoming traffic on a single lane road, in India.
This bidirectional negotiation, i.e., single lane road traffic negotiation, requires the motion planning and decision-making algorithms of autonomous vehicles to be able to understand when to shift off-road, and how much to shift, depending on how much the incoming vehicle is ready to yield, and then make appropriate behavioral decisions. We showcased this capability for the first time in the field of autonomous driving in our October 2023 demo.
In our earlier demos, we have shown our autonomous vehicles negotiating very complex, stochastic, and adversarial traffic-dynamics, like our Level-5 demo at the Toll-Plaza last month, and then the Bhopal city demo on the night of the new year.
In this demo, we present autonomous driving at night through very dense fog while negotiating incoming traffic on a single-lane road. In such scenarios, the incoming traffic vehicle's headlights completely blind the ego-vehicle's visual sensors, like the cameras.
While robust detection of obstacles at night using only the cameras, including perceiving their shape and estimating their depth, is an active area of unsupervised deep learning research at Swaayatt Robots (स्वायत्त रोबोट्स), to showcase our capabilities to work with fused information of visual sensors, we made use of a LiDAR in this demo.
During the initial 15 seconds, it can be seen to avoid the incoming vehicle, which didn't yield any room for our vehicle; our vehicle decided to shift off-roads, to enable a successful negotiation without coming to a complete halt.
Again, this is the first of its kind of a demo, where an autonomous vehicle is negotiating a single-lane road with bidirectional traffic at night, through FOG. It is second only to our daytime demo of complex negotiation in October of last year.