A Perception Pipeline for Expeditionary Autonomous Ground Vehicles

Expeditionary environments create special challenges for perception systems in autonomous ground vehicles. To address these challenges, a perception pipeline has been developed that fuses data from multiple sensors (color, thermal, LIDAR) with different sensing modalities and spatial resolutions. The paper begins with in-depth discussion of the multi-sensor calibration procedure. It then follows the flow of data through the perception pipeline, detailing the process by which the sensor data is combined in the world model representation. Topics of interest include stereo filtering, stereo and LIDAR ground segmentation, pixel classification, 3D occupancy grid aggregation, and costmap generation.