LIDAR-based Collision-Free Space Estimation Approach

As autonomous technologies flourish within the vehicle industry, an increasing number of academic autonomous competitions are appearing. One of them is the Shell Eco-marathon Autonomous Urban Concept competition (SEM AUC) which seeks to provide hands-on experience for the academic community to design, build and test their own driverless vehicles within a realistic infrastructure. The team at our university participates in this competition and our concept is to rely on simple and robust algorithms. This paper presents a simple collision-free space estimation algorithm for the LiDAR sensor.