We present a real-time vehicle detection and tracking system to accomplish the complex task of driving behavior analysis in urban environments. We propose a robust fusion system that combines a monocular camera and a 2D Lidar. This system takes advantage of three key components: robust vehicle detection using deep learning techniques, high precision range estimation from Lidar, and road context from the prior map knowledge. The camera and Lidar sensor fusion, data association and track management are all performed in the global map coordinate system by taking into account the sensors' characteristics. Lastly, behavior reasoning is performed by examining the tracked vehicle states in the lane coordinate system in which the road context is encoded. We validated our approach by tracking a leading vehicle while it performed usual urban driving behaviors such as lane keeping, stop-and-go at intersections, lane changing, overtaking and turning. The leading vehicle was tracked consistently throughout the 2.3 km route and its behavior was classified reliably.

We present the development of a full-scale “parallel autonomy” research platform including software and hardware. In the parallel autonomy paradigm, the control of the vehicle is shared; the human is still in control of the vehicle, but the autonomy system is always running in the background to prevent accidents. Our holistic approach includes: (1) a drive-by-wire conversion method only based on reverse engineering mounting of relatively inexpensive sensors onto the vehicle implementation of a localization and mapping system, (4) obstacle detection and (5) a shared controller as well as (6) integration with an advanced autonomy simulation system (Drake) for rapid development and testing. The system can operate in three modes: (a) manual driving, (b) full autonomy, where the system is in complete control of the vehicle and (c) parallel autonomy, where the shared controller is implemented. We present results from extensive testing of a full-scale vehicle on closed tracks that demonstrate these capabilities.

In this paper, we describe methods of conveying perception information and motion intention from self driving vehicles to the surrounding environment. One method is by equipping autonomous vehicles with Light-Emitting Diode (LED) strips to convey perception information; typical pedestrian-driver acknowledgement is replaced by visual feedback via lights which change color to signal the presence of obstacles in the surrounding environment. Another method is by broadcasting audio cues of the vehicle's motion intention to the environment. The performance of the autonomous vehicles as social robots is improved by building trust and engagement with interacting pedestrians. The software and hardware systems are detailed, and a video demonstrates the working system in real application. Further extension of the work for multi-class mobility in human environments is discussed.

We detail the design of autonomous golf cars which were used in public trials in Singapore's Chinese and Japanese Gardens, for the purpose of raising public awareness and gaining user acceptance of autonomous vehicles. The golf cars were designed to be robust, reliable, and safe, while operating under prolonged durations. Considerations that went in to the overall system design included the fact that any member of the public had to not only be able to easily use the system, but to also not have the option to use the system in an unintended manner. This paper details the hardware and software components of the golf cars with these considerations, and also how the booking system and mission planner facilitated users to book for a golf car from any of ten stations within the gardens. We show that the vehicles performed robustly throughout the prolonged operations with a small localization variance, and that users were very receptive from the user survey results.

Contemporary datacenters comprise hundreds or thousands of machines running applications requiring high availability and responsiveness. Although a performance crisis is easily detected by monitoring key end-to-end performance indicators (KPIs) such as response latency or request throughput, the variety of conditions that can lead to KPI degradation makes it difficult to select appropriate recovery actions. We propose and evaluate a methodology for automatic classification and identification of crises, and in particular for detecting whether a given crisis has been seen before, so that a known solution may be immediately applied. Our approach is based on a new and efficient representation of the datacenter's state called a fingerprint, constructed by statistical selection and summarization of the hundreds of performance metrics typically collected on such systems. Our evaluation uses 4 months of trouble-ticket data from a production datacenter with hundreds of machines running a 24x7 enterprise-class user-facing application. In experiments in a realistic and rigorous operational setting, our approach provides operators the information necessary to initiate recovery actions with 80% correctness in an average of 10 minutes, which is 50 minutes earlier than the deadline provided to us by the operators. To the best of our knowledge this is the first rigorous evaluation of any such approach on a large-scale production installation.

Ethnography has gained considerable prominence as a technique for informing CSCW systems development of the nature of work. Experiences of ethnography reported to date have focused on the use of prolonged on-going enthnography to inform systems design. A considerable number of these studies have taken place within constrained and focused work domain. This paper reflects more generally on the experiences of using ethnography across a number of different projects and in a variety of domains of study. We identify a number of ways in which we have used ethnography to inform design and consider the benefits and problems of each.