Aggressive Autonomous Control on Snow and Ice

In cold and snowy areas, low-friction and non-uniform road surfaces make vehicle control complex. Manually driving a car becomes a labor-intensive process with higher risks. To explore the upper limits of vehicle motion on snow and ice, we use an existing aggressive autonomous algorithm as a testing tool. We built our 1:5 scaled test platform and proposed an RGBA-based cost map generation method to generate cost maps from either recorded GPS waypoints or manually designed waypoints. From the test results, the AutoRally software can be used on our test platform, which has the same wheelbase but different weights and actuators. Due to the different platforms, the maximum speed that the vehicle can reach is reduced by 1.38% and 2.26% at 6.0 m/s and 8.5 m/s target speeds. When tested on snow and ice surfaces, compared to the max speed on dirt (7.51 m/s), the maximum speed decreased by 48% and 53.9%, respectively. In addition to the significant performance degradation on snow and ice, the failure cases during testing also reveal the process of losing control and the potential hazards, which also inspired us for future research directions.