The latest Laserscanner development of IBEO combines several innovations for automotive use. The sensor is a Multilayer scanner, which measures both distances and reflectivities simultaneously in 4 horizontal scan planes. This can be used to compensate pitching of the vehicle. Also, a multi target capability is integrated which allows the sensor to detect two distances with a single measurement, e.g. to be robust against rain. A system architecture for detection and modeling of dynamic traffic scenes is used to give a general idea of the different tasks to reach the goal of a complete environmental model using a sensor for a wide range of applications. Today, active safety is a big issue in the automotive sector, and huge advances in the protection of both occupants and other road users are expected from active safety systems. In order to further improve active safety systems, like collision avoidance or Pre Crash, they will also include object recognition around the vehicle to detect dangerous situations as far in the future as possible. However, the assessment of how dangerous the situation - or the object in question - is for the passengers of the vehicle is difficult, but obviously of great importance. Beside the threat for the vehicle, also the threat for the detected object, which might be a pedestrian or cyclist, may be of critical importance for the choice of possible avoidance or mitigation strategies. To both assess the situation and decide on the safest reaction strategy, special sensors and processing algorithms are needed. In the following, first the Laserscanner LD Multilayer is described, both with its hardware capabilities and system configuration. Then, special algorithms for obstacle detection, tracking and classification are outlined.
Abstract