Overview of Lane Following System

An automated lane-following system, also known as an automated lane keeping system (ALKS), enables autonomous vehicles to travel within a marked lane and avoid collision with a lead vehicle traveling in the same lane. Automated Driving Toolbox™ provides various application examples to design, test, and validate a lane-following system and its components. This topic introduces the components of a lane-following system, presents an overview of various application examples, and helps you get started building a lane-following system.

Introduction

A lane-following system receives input from camera and radar sensors and outputs steering angle and control commands to a vehicle dynamics system, which models the motion of the ego vehicle. A lane-following system consists of these components:

Lane Detector — Detects lane boundaries from camera frames to enable the ego vehicle to travel within a marked lane.
Vehicle Detector — Detects vehicles in camera frames to enable the ego vehicle to avoid collision with surrounding vehicles.
Sensor Fusion and Tracking — Improves the robustness of perception by fusing information from camera and radar sensors. This component also tracks the positions of detected vehicles across multiple frames so the ego vehicle can predict the trajectories of other vehicles and make intelligent decisions.
Decision Logic and Control — Makes decisions about the behavior and trajectory of the ego vehicle based on its perceived environment. Specifically, this component estimates the lane center using detected lane boundaries and detects the lead vehicle in the ego lane. This component also computes the required acceleration and steering angle to enable the ego vehicle to execute a planned motion.

Block diagram of lane-following system

Component-Based Development

Automated Driving Toolbox provides several examples for developing various components of a lane-following system. Using these examples, you can perform these tasks for components of a highway lane-following system:

Design, test, and deploy workflow for components of highway lane following system

Design — Design examples show you how to design and simulate a particular component of a lane-following system.
Generate Code — Code generation examples show you how to generate code of a component model, and verify the generated code by using software-in-the-loop (SIL) simulation.
Automate Testing — Automate testing examples show you how to automate the testing of a component model against multiple test scenarios, configured using system requirements.
Deploy — Deployment examples show you how to deploy a component model to a target machine and perform automated testing of the deployed application.

This table summarizes the component-level examples for highway lane-following system.

Component		Sensor Input	Simulation Environment	Task
Component		Sensor Input	Simulation Environment	Design	Generate Code	Automate Testing	Deploy
Lane Marker Detector		Camera	Unreal Engine^®	Design Lane Marker Detector Using Unreal Engine Simulation Environment	Generate Code for Lane Marker Detector	Automate Testing for Lane Marker Detector	—
Vehicle Detector		Camera	Unreal Engine	Generate Code for Vision Vehicle Detector		Automate Testing for Vision Vehicle Detector	—
Sensor Fusion and Tracking		Camera and radar detections	Unreal Engine	Forward Vehicle Sensor Fusion	—	Automate Testing for Forward Vehicle Sensor Fusion	Automate Real-Time Testing for Forward Vehicle Sensor Fusion Automate PIL Testing for Forward Vehicle Sensor Fusion Automate Real-Time Testing of Highway Lane Following Controller Using ASAM XIL
Decision Logic and Control		Lanes and actors truth	Unreal Engine	Generate Code for Highway Lane Following Controller		Automate Testing for Highway Lane Following Controller	Automate Real-Time Testing for Highway Lane Following Controller
Component Assembly		Camera and radar detections	Unreal Engine	—	Generate C++ Message Interfaces for Lane Following Controls and Sensor Fusion	Automate Testing for Highway Lane Following Controls and Sensor Fusion	—
Sensor Fusion and Tracking	Decision Logic and Control	Camera and radar detections	Unreal Engine	—			—

System-Level Design

Automated Driving Toolbox provides these examples that integrate different components to build a lane-following system. You can design and automate testing of a lane-following system. You can also cosimulate the lane-following system with RoadRunner Scenario.

Task	Sensor Input	Simulation Environment	Example	Remarks
Design	Camera and radar	Unreal Engine	Highway Lane Following	Base system-level example Non-ego actors follow predefined trajectories
Automate Testing	Camera and radar	Unreal Engine	Automate Testing for Highway Lane Following	Automate testing of the base system-level example
Design	Camera and radar	Unreal Engine	Highway Lane Following with Intelligent Vehicles	Non-ego actors adapt their trajectories based on the behavior of neighboring vehicles
Design	Camera and radar	RoadRunner Scenario and Unreal Engine	Highway Lane Following with RoadRunner Scenario	Simulate highway lane-following application with RoadRunner Scenario
Design	Camera and radar detections	RoadRunner Scenario	Lane-Keeping System for Self-Driving Trucks	Design a lane-keeping system for self-driving trucks in Simulink^® and simulate it with RoadRunner Scenario.