Autonomous driving is not a vision anymore. Many giant IT companies like Apple, Google and NVIDIA have started placing themselves into the competitive race toward making the first fully autonomous car along with companies from other sectors. Classic car manufactures like Mercedes Benz, Renault, Toyota, Nissan and newly introduced Hi-Tech automakers like Tesla along with many other companies from other industries are competing to have a bigger role in the future market. Autonomous cars will change any thing related to transportation as we know today: urban infrastructures, government policies, consumer demands, related technologies and every other aspect related to the daily transportation will be changed in the near future. This is why autonomous vehicles, or the process of driving without presence of a human driver is called a disruptive technology: the technology that changes every thing at it’s advent.
Imagine you wake up in the morning and after an invigorating run you are ready to take your freshening breakfast while checking your schedule for the day. Meanwhile, you receive a notification on your smart watch; your car has appeared in front of your house and is waiting for your children to get them to school. While packing daily meal for your kids, you inform your car to pick those freshly baked croissants you have ordered last night from local pastry shop before heading to kids school. You bring your kids into the car and that’s it ! you’re ready for your own personal day while your car is waiting at traffic jams, instead of you. After a shower, you pick your stuff and are ready to get in your car which has just arrived at your door, after taking your kids to their school. At the door, you see your disabled neighbor getting into his car while waving hands to you. You wave back and feel happy for him to be able to ride his own car without help of others. After getting into your car you tell it to visit your partner’s office first to be able to check in for some paper works. Your car, then informs you about the construction problem in the parking lot it used to park itself and asks you if it must keep driving while you are in your partner`s office or should park itself in some other location and wait for you to tell it to come back. You authorize your car to drive freely in some streets near the office until you come back, because actually you will be very quick with the paper works. You enter the authorization command for this prompt as the administrator with the face ID and your trip to your work will start in seconds.
Now, all the way up to your partner`s office, you are free replying some emails, checking your weekly schedule, the status of your late submission into some events while having your fresh coffee in your personal car, heading to the office. In a few minutes you are ready to enter the office while you have already replied some of your emails, planned for your Skype meeting and have reserved a table for your dinner with your spouse for the night. Believing or not, this is what will happen in at least the next 20 years due to opinion of many experts. While Deloitte calls it a race to autonomous mobility and McKinsey calls it the 6th most important trending disruptive technology for the next decade, a tendency is begun to make the fully-autonomous driving dream a truth and the future of mobility is going to be very different, which is already being shaped by the hands of many engineers and Hi-Tech corporations across all the world. ARAS-CAR Project, getting it’s root withing the ARAS Autonomous Robotics research group has been started to play a significant role in this worldwide trending technological effort with the help of local talented students.
Our Team
Prof. Hamid D. Taghirad
Team Director
Professor, and Vice Chancellor for Global Strategies & International Affairs, and Director of Advanced Robotics and Automated Systems (ARAS) at K. N. Toosi University of Technology
Dr. Alireza Norouzzadeh
Team Leader
PhD, Electrical Engineering, K. N. Toosi University of Technology
Director of Research Office, Tavanir Co.
Faraz Lotfi
Team Member
PhD Student at ARAS Autonomous Robotics group
Vahid Ajjaluian
Team Member
M.Sc. student at ARAS Autonomous Robotics group.
ARAS Driver-less Car Projects, at a glance!
The Autonomous Car project has been started in a collaboration with SAIPA Group. The main goal of the project is to establish a software system for autonomous driving process. The chosen platform for this project is an automatic vehicle called Quick from the SAIPA corporation. Road scene object detection (such as cars, bicycle and pedestrian), real-time object detection and tracking, image based object distance estimation and domestic data set gathering is some of current active projects of this team. You may find more details about this project and it’s progress on ARAS autonomous car with Quick! .
The Detection and Tracking of Multiple Moving Objects (DaTMO) Software Package project has been started to develop a software package for detection and tracking of dynamic objects in different road scenes. DaTMO-SP consists of two different software modules: Detection and Tracking. Until now the package is only designed and developed as a LiDAR based solution for DaTMO problem. Further modifications toward implementing sensor fusion methods on this package, is starting to take place in near future. For more details on this project please visit DaTMO-SP page.
