Research on Data Fusion of Positioning System with a Fault Detection Mechanism for Autonomous Vehicles

Abstract

A positioning system provides useful positioning information for applications. The ability to maintain high-quality positioning information in real time is crucial. Autonomous vehicles require positioning information to plan control strategies. Inadequate positioning accuracy affects control and safety. This article explores the effect of an error detection and correction method on coordinate information fusion. This method can be used to efficiently correct positioning errors in the presence of faults. The fault detection mechanism is not limited to positioning systems with certain types of sensor applications. and it has certain flexibility in various applications. This positioning system detection method uses more than two positioning systems. Primarily, one positioning system is used to monitor the other. When the error of the positioning system differs excessively from the system setting value, the positioning fusion algorithm will make appropriate adjustments to output the corrected coordinate value. Therefore, this method integrates different positioning technologies, including a global position system (GPS), simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), inertial measurement units (IMUs), and mileage meters. Autonomous vehicles already have the required sensors deployed, and our method can be implemented at no additional cost. We integrated two positioning systems to support the positioning applications and designed a fault detection method to detect errors in the positioning system. This allowed the system to have some reference information by which to correct the coordinate information. According to the experimental findings, positioning information errors were corrected at a rate of 89.8%. The positioning system with the added detection function was able to effectively filter the data without too many errors. Additionally, the results showed that this method can effectively correct positioning errors. The results indicate that adding an error detection mechanism can effectively improve the accuracy of coordinate data fusion. Positioning systems with an error detection function can thus improve applications’ performance.