Enhancing autonomous driving through intelligent navigation: A comprehensive improvement approach

In this paper, an intelligent navigation system is developed to achieve accurate and rapid response to autonomous driving. The system is improved with three modules: target detection, distance measurement, and navigation obstacle avoidance. In the target detection module, the YOLOv7x-CM model is proposed to improve the efficiency and accuracy of target detection by introducing the CBAM attention mechanism and MPDioU loss function. In the obstacle distance measurement module, the concept of an off-center angle is introduced to optimize the traditional monocular distance measurement method. In the obstacle avoidance module, acceleration jump and steering speed constraints are introduced into the local path planning algorithm TEB, and the TEB-S algorithm is proposed. Finally, this paper evaluates the performance of the system modules using the KITTI dataset and the BDD100K dataset. It is demonstrated that YOLOv7x-CM improves the mAP @ 0.5 metrics by 5.3% and 6.8% on the KITTI dataset and the BDD100K dataset, respectively, and the FPS also increases by 35.4%. Secondly, for the optimized monocular detection method, the average relative distance error is reduced by 9 times. In addition, the proposed TEB-S algorithm has a shorter obstacle avoidance path and higher efficiency than the normal TEB algorithm.