The ARGO Autonomous Vehicle's Vision and Control Systems

This paper presents the current status of the ARGO Project, whose main target is the development of an active safety system and an automatic pilot for a standard road vehicle. First the ARGO project is briefly described along with its main objectives, then the prototype vehicle and its functionalities are presented. The perception of the environment is performed through the processing of images acquired from the vehicle; details about the detection of lane markings, generic obstacles and leading vehicles are given. The paper describes the current implementation of the control system, based on a gain scheduled controller, which allows the vehicle to follow the road and/or other vehicles, while future control strategies (flatness approach) are presented with simulations results. The paper ends with a description of the MilleMiglia in Automatico tour, a journey through Italy performed in automatic driving, together with some concluding remarks.