Seamless Vehicle Positioning by Lidar-GNSS Integration: Standalone and Multi-Epoch Scenarios

Abstract

Accurate and seamless vehicle positioning is fundamental for autonomous driving tasks in urban environments, requiring the provision of high-end measuring devices. Light Detection and Ranging (lidar) sensors, together with Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) receivers, are therefore commonly found onboard modern vehicles. In this paper, we propose an integration of lidar and GNSS code measurements at the observation level via a mixed measurement model. An Extended Kalman-Filter (EKF) is implemented to capture the dynamic of the vehicle movement, and thus, to incorporate the vehicle velocity parameters into the measurement model. The lidar positioning component is realized using point cloud registration through a deep neural network, which is aided by a high definition (HD) map comprising accurately georeferenced scans of the road environments. Experiments conducted in a densely built-up environment show that, by exploiting the abundant measurements of GNSS and high accuracy of lidar, the proposed vehicle positioning approach can maintain centimeter-to meter-level accuracy for the entirety of the driving duration in urban canyons.