China Intelligent Vehicle Future Challenge (IVFC'2014) starts in Changshu

China's two-day IVFC 2014 driverless car contest got underway this morning in Changshu in east China's Jiangsu province.


IEEE Xplore Abstract - Task-Specific Performance Evaluation of UGVs: Case Studies at the IVFC

Performance evaluation is considered as an important part of the
unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) development; it helps to discover research
problems and improves driving safety. In this paper, a task-specific
performance evaluation model of UGVs applied in the Intelligent Vehicle
Future Challenge (IVFC) annual competitions is discussed. It is defined
in functional levels with a formal evaluation process, including metrics
analysis, metrics preprocessing, weights calculation, and a technique
for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution and fuzzy
comprehensive evaluation methods. IVFC 2012 is selected as a case study
and overall performances of five UGVs are evaluated with specific
analyzed autonomous driving tasks of environment perception, structural
on-road driving, unstructured zone driving, and dynamic path planning.
The model is proved to be helpful in IVFC serial competition UGVs
performance evaluation.

Featured Article - China Future Challenge: Beyond the Intelligent Vehicle

IEEE ITS v16n2April2014.pdf  article describes competition last year

By Prof. Jingmin Xin, Chenghong Wang, Zhaotian Zhang, and
Nanning Zheng, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China

The 2013 China Intelligent Vehicle Future Challenge (IVFC’2013) was held on November 2 to 4, 2013 in Changshu, Jiangsu, China. This competition of unmanned vehicles was hosted by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC)
and organized by the People’s Government of Changshu City, Jiangsu Province, China.


In August 2008, the NSFC started the Major Research Plan “Cognitive Computing of Visual and Auditory Information” (study period: 2008 to 2015, total funding: 190 million RMB Yuan [$30,997,654.50]). The overall purposes of this major research plan are to study and construct new computational models and methods based on the human visual and auditory cognitive mechanism and to improve the computers’ comprehension
ability of unstructured visual and auditory perception information and their processing efficiency of massive heterogeneous information by giving full plays to the  interdisciplinary advantages of information science, life science and mathematics.


Especially one of the goals of this major research plan is to develop the verification platforms of unmanned vehicles with the perception of natural environment and the
ability of decision making. As an important part of this national major research plan, the competition of IVFC has been held annually since 2009. In order to make better progress and to promote the original innovations of this major research plan, the purpose of IVFC is to provide a platform for academic exchange and inspection for exploring the efficient computing models and improving the computers’ comprehension ability of unstructured visual and auditory perception information and their processing efficiency of massive heterogeneous information. In the past six years, this major research plan funded 84 projects as fostering projects, key funding projects or integrated projects from more than 490 proposals, where the averaged funding was about 1.59 million RMB Yuan per  project.

Figure 1:Venues of five competitions of IVFC in China

The IVFC’2013 was the fifth competition of unmanned vehicle and the third one undertaken in the environment of real roads, and it was the first competition held in the southern cities of China, where the first four IVFCs were held in Xi’an, Ordos and Chifeng in 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 as shown in Fig. 1, and the team of the University of Parma, Italy attended the IVFC’2009. The IVFC’2013 was also the largest and more difficult competition, and there were 16 participating teams from major universities and research institutions in the research fields of intelligent vehicle such as

• Beijing University of Technology,
• Chang’an University,
• Military Transportation University,
  
• Nanjing University of Science & Technology,
• Shanghai Jiaotong University,
• Tongji University,
• Tsinghua University,
• Wuhan University,
• Xi’an Jiaotong University, and
• Hefei Institutes of Physical Science, Chinese Academy of Science.
• The team of Seoul National University, Korea
  also participated in this competition. Additionally, some emergency and
  rescue vehicles, ambulances, and five vehicles for the match-referee
  provided technical supports for the IVFC’2013.

By using various sensors to perceive the environment outside vehicle and processing the obtained information with the processing mechanisms and methods of visual and auditory information, the unmanned vehicles can achieve the self-driving through the self-control and intelligent decision-making processes. The IVFC’2013 included two parts:

• the suburban road testing (about 18 km) and
• the urban road testing (about 5 km), where there were many bridges, tree-tunnel, entrance ramp, the school gate and other scenes.

The assessment criteria were set as follows:

• in the former testing,
  
  the interference of some moving vehicles,
• recognition of traffic lights,
• construction detour,
• obstacle avoidance, and
• stopping at finish line
• while in the later testing criteria included
• U-Turn,
• intersection crossing,
• slow-down in front of school and
• stopping for pedestrians

Unlike the unmanned vehicles developed in Europe and other developed countries, which basically rely on the GPS information and the navigation of electronic map, the IVFC requires the  participating vehicles to percept the natural environment outside the
vehicle with the equipped sensors such as the cameras for verifying the computers’ handling capacity and efficiency of visual and auditory information. Moreover in the IVFC’2013, the 4S (i.e., safety, smartness, smoothness, and speed) criteria were also used to evaluate the driving behavior of each unmanned vehicle. Additionally for enriching the competition content, the man-machine confrontation, challenge between
teams and the friend match with Korean team were arranged during the IVFC’2013.