Lidar vendor Cepton and ALP.Lab, an Austrian testing house, are partnering to build a lidar-equipped testing environment for studying complicated road driving situations.
This will include the delivery of real-world traffic data from complex urban and rural alpine intersections in Austria. The country of Austria includes a variety of road driving conditions whether it be in snow, fog or mountainous regions. The project will compile a realistic database of different driving scenarios that will be needed for the testing and verification of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous vehicles in complex environments.
Through the partnership, the so-called Helius smart lidar system will capture real-time, 3D traffic data to support the training of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms used for scenario-based testing of ADAS and self-driving cars. The collected data will allow companies to predict vehicle trajectories at intersections and enable traffic data analysis flow optimization.
The Helius system, which includes a number of Vista P60 lidar sensors from Cepton, were installed at road intersections and traffic roundabouts for traffic monitoring and analysis applications. Lidar offers all-day availability due to its perception capabilities amid various lighting conditions such as nighttime, shadows and the glare of strong headlights.
The Vista-P60 lidar offers a high detection range of 200 meters at 30% reflectivity and an angular resolution of 0.25° allowing the sensor to accurately detect each arriving and departing vehicle and pedestrian at up to 170 meters around the intersections.
Helius takes the point cloud data from the lidar sensors and delivers real-time 3D information on object dimensions, locations and velocities. This allows the system to track and classify the different objects involved in a traffic situation and the sensors used by ALP.Lab only capture anonymized data to protect privacy while still providing traffic data.
The Helius smart lidar system features rotation-free, mirrorless and frictionless design that makes the Vista-P60 sensors very durable and embeddable. The system can also withstand harsh outdoor environments and cold climates to drive down maintenance costs.
