Road Maps and Sensor Integration for the Enhancement of Lane-Keeping Assistants

Abstract

Current efforts of vehicle manufacturers and research groups in designing and developing safer Intelligent Transportation Systems have revolved around achieving higher levels of driving automation for on-road vehicles. However, current approaches remain unable to assure safe vehicle autonomy in all conditions. Leveraging the communication between the infrastructure, for instance, the road geometry from high-definition maps, and vehicles could be a key enabler of safer Intelligent Transportation Systems. This combination would increase the overall traffic awareness which could benefit current automation approaches. In this study, a new lane-keeping system integrating information from a road map, satellite receiver, and inertial sensors is presented. Tests driving in complex urban environments showed that the proposed system kept the vehicle centered in the lanes during long satellite outages. This result was accomplished with a novel integration between the inertial and road map where the inertial was calibrated by the Map. The position cross-track accuracy upper and lower bounds, at 95% confidence, were 3 and 1 cm from achieving the control limit level (0.1 m) for Intelligent Transportation Location Based Systems. With these results, this work provides a new contribution to increase the robustness of current lane-keeping assistant approaches.