Safe unmanned autonomous driving to become possible in harsh environments such as rain, snow, and dust

[Smart City Today]

The Agency for Defense Development (ADD) announced that it has secured various data for stable driving of unmanned autonomous vehicles in harsh environments such as rain, snow, smoke, and dust.

The ADD conducted an international joint study with the Defense Science Organization (DSO) in Singapore, which has had excellent technology in computer vision and data processing for about two and a half years starting in March 2020.

The ADD secured sensor data through a multi-sensor data acquisition device consisting of 6 sensors in a snow/smoke environment condition, and DSO in a rain/dust environment.

The two institutions quantitatively analyzed the performance degradation of each sensor in a poor environment, checked the characteristics according to environmental conditions, and input sensor data into the currently used driving area algorithm and object detection algorithm to find out the performance limit of each algorithm.

ADD said that each algorithm's performance analysis will help not only research and development but also establish the military's operational concept as it can predict the range of unmanned autonomous vehicles depending on environmental conditions.

The data secured through this international joint study is expected to contribute to deriving the optimal sensor combination when designing unmanned autonomous vehicles in the future and increasing the utilization of advanced autonomous driving technologies.

In addition, this achievement can be used to develop autonomous driving environment recognition algorithms and will contribute to shortening the budget and period of developing advanced autonomous driving technologies.

In the field of self-driving environment recognition technology, it is also expected to contribute to the development and commercialization of private technology for unmanned vehicles or autonomous vehicles by establishing itself as a future core technology that can be used by both the civilian and military.