New Dataset for Self-Driving Agents and Mapping Tasks
Both autonomous cars and agents have been a buzz lately presenting advances that are transforming the way we drive and interact with robots. The only reason we have not seen a lot of self-driving cars on our roads is that most of the technologies they are meant to use is still under research and development.
Research in this field has been expanded massively in the last few years. For instance, publicly available datasets have been on the rise in the last two decades. Regrettably, many large datasets in the domain are not freely available. A new dataset that’s publicly available has been released to boost research in the field.
The Brno Urban Dataset
A group of researchers has made publicly available over 10 hours of car driving records covering more than 350 km which to the best of their knowledge is not available in any other public dataset.
The dataset covering a wide range of environments such as the city center, suburbs, highway, countryside, etc. was recorded in Brno — Czech Republic and the surrounding areas. It contains data from high-quality sensors — four WUXGA cameras, two 3D LiDARs, inertial measurement unit, infrared camera and especially differential RTK GNSS receiver with centimeter accuracy.
The one special thing about this data is the use of a thermal camera that helps to orient in difficult weather lightening conditions. All the data are precisely timestamped with sub-millisecond precision to allow wider range of applications. The research also provides tools for allowing basic data processing.
Why Does This Matter?
I agree with what the researchers have to say regarding this paper. That sharing data allows many more researchers to participate in the progress of a particular field by enriching it with new and fresh ideas, which rewards everybody in the end.
Presented freely in an easily readable raw format and provide a script for conversion into the ROS bag Brno dataset has the ability to boost research for the development of autonomous driving. It is the wish of the researchers to update the data with radar, odometry and neural network data preprocessing sensors
Access the dataset using this link
Read more: Brno Urban Dataset
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