MapLite : autonomous navigation in rural environments without detailed prior maps

Abstract

Most autonomous vehicle systems currently rely on high-definition prior maps in order to localize and navigate in their environment. In this work, we present MapLite: a one-click autonomous navigation system capable of piloting a vehicle to an arbitrary desired destination point given only a sparse publicly available topometric map (from OpenStreetMap). The onboard sensors are used to segment the road region and register the topometric map in order to fuse the high-level navigation goals with a variational path planner in the vehicle frame. This enables the system to plan trajectories that correctly navigate road intersections without the use of an external localization system such as GPS or a detailed prior map. Since the topometric maps already exist for the vast majority of roads, this solution greatly increases the geographical scope for autonomous mobility solutions. We implement MapLite on a full-scale autonomous vehicle and exhaustively test it on over 15km of real-world driving including over 100 autonomous intersection traversals. We further extend these results through simulated testing to validate the system on complex road junction topologies such as traffic circles.