Download or read book Neural Network Perception for Mobile Robot Guidance written by Dean A. Pomerleau and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dean Pomerleau's trainable road tracker, ALVINN, is arguably the world's most famous neural net application. It currently holds the world's record for distance traveled by an autonomous robot without interruption: 21.2 miles along a highway, in traffic, at speedsofup to 55 miles per hour. Pomerleau's work has received worldwide attention, including articles in Business Week (March 2, 1992), Discover (July, 1992), and German and Japanese science magazines. It has been featured in two PBS series, "The Machine That Changed the World" and "By the Year 2000," and appeared in news segments on CNN, the Canadian news and entertainment program "Live It Up", and the Danish science program "Chaos". What makes ALVINN especially appealing is that it does not merely drive - it learns to drive, by watching a human driver for roughly five minutes. The training inputstothe neural networkare a video imageoftheroad ahead and thecurrentposition of the steering wheel. ALVINN has learned to drive on single lane, multi-lane, and unpaved roads. It rapidly adapts to other sensors: it learned to drive at night using laser reflectance imaging, and by using a laser rangefinder it learned to swerve to avoid obstacles and maintain a fixed distance from a row of parked cars. It has even learned to drive backwards.