Autonomous Vehicle Systems

TORC Technologies proprietary Hybrid Deliberative-Reactive JAUS-based (Joint Architecture for Unmanned Systems) architecture provides the foundation for integrating algorithms for autonomous vehicle control. The software components within this architecture include: Mission Planning, Behaviors, Motion Planning, and Perception. Our team of software engineers will work to integrate this architecture and apply existing algorithms to your autonomous vehicle application.

Mission Planning

The Mission Planner component is the coarsest level of decision planning within the Deliberative-Reactive Architecture. The Mission Planner is responsible for determining which waypoint segments the vehicle should travel to complete a mission. The Mission Planner uses a-priori information such as terrain profiles, road networks, and information gathered during missions. After processing, the Mission Planner outputs a series of waypoints to the Behaviors module.

Behaviors

The Behaviors component is responsible for following rules during a mission. These behaviors may include rules for any platform such as intersection progression for ground vehicles, docking for surface vehicles, or avoidance rules for aerial vehicles. Often times rules and guidelines may conflict. As a result, a Winner-Takes-All mechanism is used in the Behavior architecture. The Behavior Integrator is responsible for ensuring that there is a 'winner' from each rule so a full behavior profile can be generated at any time. This structure also allows for greater modularity and specialization for specific applications.

Motion Planning

Motion Planning is the decision making layer between Behaviors and the Vehicle Interface that converts target points into a series of vehicle commands. Motion Planning generates a navigation strategy to safely achieve these set goal points. The two main subdivisions are lanes and zones. Lane navigation requires the vehicle to maintain strict boundaries and conform to the motion other vehicles. If static obstacles are present and an achievable trajectory exists, Motion Planning will navigate around these obstacles. Zones, on the other hand, are much less structured and require a balance of speed and steering based obstacle avoidance.

Perception

TORC has developed a broad range of perception algorithms for performing localization, road detection, and object classification. These algorithms integrate information from sensors such as LIDAR, RADAR