Tech Report Available

[Dean.Pomerleau@F.GP.CS.CMU.EDU]

A shorter version of the following tech report will appear in 
the proceedings of the 1988 NIPS Conference.

To request a copy, please send e-mail to copetas at cs.cmu.edu
and ask for tech report CMU-CS-89-107.  Don't forget to send
your hard mail address.

--Dean

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ALVINN: An Autonomous Land Vehicle In a Neural Network

                Dean A. Pomerleau
                  January 1989
                  CMU-CS-89-107

                    ABSTRACT

ALVINN (Autonomous Land Vehicle In a Neural Network) is a 3-layer
back-propagation network designed for the task of road following.
Currently ALVINN takes images from a camera and a laser range finder 
as input and produces as output the direction the vehicle should 
travel in order to follow the road.  Training has been conducted 
using simulated road images.  Successful tests on the Carnegie Mellon 
autonomous navigation test vehicle indicate that the network can 
effectively follow real roads under certain field conditions.  The 
representation developed to perform the task differs dramatically when 
the network is trained under various conditions, suggesting the 
possibility of a novel adaptive autonomous navigation system capable 
of tailoring its processing to the conditions at hand.
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