A team in BAE Systems Australia has been working with the Defence Science and Technology Group in the Department of Defence, as well as the universities of Melbourne and Adelaide, to help solve this problem by augmenting sensor data from the environment such as real-time LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging), electro optical and radar sensor data; with historic satellite data.
Andrew, the Software and Algorithms Lead, talked about the purpose of the programme: “We want to provide autonomous vehicles that can effectively achieve their goals, which can only happen when vehicles are able to identify what’s around them and behave accordingly - they need to know if it’s a bush in front of them they can drive through.”
The team has made some significant progress in trials, demonstrating that the vehicle can drive around, take in raw sensor data, compare it with the satellite data and fuse it together to make a better decision about objects than if it was relying on either data source in isolation. The vehicles were able to use this to avoid obstacles and fed back ‘semantic maps’ to operators, sorting the objects around them into groups with a high level of accuracy.