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Automotive Engineering ›› 2024, Vol. 46 ›› Issue (11): 2017-2027.doi: 10.19562/j.chinasae.qcgc.2024.11.008

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Algorithm for Detecting Free Space in Underground Mine Tunnels for Autonomous Vehicles

Zhijun Chen1,2,Chaowei Wang1,2,Chaozhong Wu1,3,4(),Chuang Qian1,Huaizhu Wu5,Guangjun Shen5   

  1. 1.Intelligent Transportation Systems Research Center,Wuhan University of Technology,Wuhan 430063
    2.School of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence,Wuhan University of Technology,Wuhan 430070
    3.Engineering Research Center of Transportation Information and Safety,Ministry of Education,Wuhan 430063
    4.Hubei University of Arts and Science,Xiangyang 441053
    5.Dongfeng Commercial Vehicle Technical Center,Dongfeng Commercial Vehicle Co. ,Ltd. ,Wuhan 430056
  • Received:2024-06-07 Revised:2024-07-09 Online:2024-11-25 Published:2024-11-22
  • Contact: Chaozhong Wu E-mail:wucz@whut.edu.cn

Abstract:

The detection of free space in underground mine tunnels is the key sensing technology for underground mining autonomous driving systems. However, the characteristics of low illumination and complex working environment inside the tunnels bring great challenges to this task. In view of this, in this paper an algorithm for detecting free space in underground mine tunnels is proposed. Firstly, a dual-branch feature extraction backbone network is proposed to solve the problem of difficulty in extracting image features caused by the degradation of tunnel details. Secondly, for the problem of incomplete detection of drivable areas in underground mining tunnels, an adaptive multi-scale atrous spatial pyramid pooling feature enhancement module is proposed. Finally, a dual-branch channel attention mechanism fusion module is developed to solve the problem of inaccurate boundary extraction in the underground mine tunnels. The experiments are conducted on a self-made dataset specifically designed for underground mine tunnels. The results show that the proposed algorithm surpasses other existing methods such as Deeplabv3+, UNet, DDRNet-23, and PIDNet, with an increase of 2.07, 2.39, 1.87, and 1.92 percentage points in terms of MIoU scores, and 1.78, 2.45, 1.84, and 1.86 in terms of mAcc scores, respectively. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm has been validated through its successful application in real mine tunnel scenarios, particularly for underground mining autonomous driving vehicles.

Key words: autonomous driving, unmanned mine truck, free space detection, semantic segmentation