Real-Time Mine Road Boundary Detection and Tracking for Autonomous Truck

Road boundary detection is an important part of the perception of the autonomous driving. It is difficult to detect road boundaries of unstructured roads because there are no curbs. There are no clear boundaries on mine roads to distinguish areas within the road boundary line and areas outside the road boundary line. This paper proposes a real-time road boundary detection and tracking method by a 3D-LIDAR sensor. The road boundary points are extracted from the detected elevated point clouds above the ground point cloud according to the spatial distance characteristics and the angular features. Road tracking is to predict and update the boundary point information in real-time, in order to prevent false and missed detection. The experimental verification of mine road data shows the accuracy and robustness of the proposed algorithm.