Autonomous driving of intelligent vehicle BIT in 2009 Future Challenge of China

The 2009 Future Challenge - Intelligent Vehicle and Beyond (FC´09) was held in Xi´an, China. Our intelligent vehicle named BIT participated in all competitions at this event. This paper describes BIT´s system structure and its capabilities. BIT combines a global path planning method and local path planning to drive the vehicle to address the challenges posted by the unknown competition environment. A novel curve tracking strategy based on preview and curve bisector is developed for complex paths such as U-turn. For recognizing traffic lights, Haar feature and AdaBoost algorithm are used to train and obtain traffic light classifiers. Normalization of every candidate region in RGB and HSV spaces is performed and compared with a threshold to fulfill the verification. The experiment describes BIT´s performance and the conclusion sets forth the main work in the next step.