The goal of autonomous driving systems (ADS) research is to give safer and economical mobility options. However, the operational design domains (ODD) of state-of-the-art ADS constraints the deployment under sunny to cloudy conditions. The weather phenomena impair the perception and navigation capabilities of ADS, so their availability is limited by geography and seasons. Furthermore, unstable vehicle control induces a strong feeling of risk to the passengers. For ADS to continue moving forward to the next era, research efforts are necessary to enable autonomous cars to get past all the weather.
Our ongoing efforts in Gifu University and Nagoya University aim to understand how the different functions of an ADS perform under adverse weather conditions, and try to solve some of the perception, navigation and control challenges to enable operation under such conditions. Our system features several types of sensor modalities plus state-of-the-art self-driving software such as Autoware.
Alex Carballo is enthusiastic about machine perception, in particular LiDARs. After his PhD in 2011, he worked in R&D for a LiDAR company. In 2017 he joined Nagoya University as research associate professor studying driving behavior and LiDAR-based perception. Finally, from 2022 he joined Gifu University as associate professor, working in perception under adverse weather conditions for autonomous vehicles, where he is leading the Intelligent Autonomous Systems Lab. (iASL). Alex also is a research fellow at Tier IV Inc., working in education activities around Autoware and ADS technologies.