This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. These works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder. Abstract Highway obstacle detection is a challenging problem.
Highways present an unknown and dynamic environment with real-time constraints.
In addition, the high speeds of travel force a system to detect objects at long ranges. Laser refectance, to our knowledge, has not been used for obstacle detection before. We will develop two detection systems, laser and stereo based, which can detect 20 cm high obstacles at 60 meters. The second system proposed is a predictive, model-based stereo method. Accurate modeling of the road and CCD sensor will enable obstacle detectoin without expensive 3-D reconstruction.