WATonoBus: An All Weather Autonomous Shuttle
Neel P. Bhatt Ruihe Zhang Minghao Ning Ahmad Reza Alghooneh Joseph Sun Pouya Panahandeh Ehsan Mohammadbagher Ted Ecclestone Ben MacCallum Ehsan Hashemi Amir Khajepour
Autonomous vehicle all-weather operation poses significant challenges,
encompassing modules from perception and decision-making to path planning and
control. The complexity arises from the need to address adverse weather
conditions like rain, snow, and fog across the autonomy stack. Conventional
model-based and single-module approaches often lack holistic integration with
upstream or downstream tasks. We tackle this problem by proposing a
multi-module and modular system architecture with considerations for adverse
weather across the perception level, through features such as snow covered curb
detection, to decision-making and safety monitoring. Through daily weekday
service on the WATonoBus platform for almost a year, we demonstrate that our
proposed approach is capable of addressing adverse weather conditions and
provide valuable learning from edge cases observed during operation.