Tracking and climbing behavior recognition of heavy-duty trucks on roadways

Abstract

The tracking and behavior recognition of heavy-duty trucks on roadways are keys for the development of automated heavy-duty trucks and an advanced driver assistance system. The spatiotemporal information of trucks from trajectory tracking and motions learnt from behavior analysis can be employed to predict possible driving risks and generate safe motion to avoid roadway accidents. This article presents a unified tracking and behavior recognition algorithm that can model the mobility of heavy-duty trucks on long inclined roadways. Random noise within the sampled elevation data is addressed by time-based segmentation to extract time-continuous samples at geographical locations. A Kalman filter is first used to distinguish error offsets from random noise and to estimate the distribution of truck elevations for different time intervals. A Markov chain Monte Carlo model is then applied to classify truck behaviors based on the change in elevation between two geographical locations. A heavy-duty truck mobility (HVMove) model is constructed based on the map information to apply the roadway geometry to the tracking and behavior recognition algorithm. We develop an extended Metropolis–Hastings algorithm to tune the parameters of the HVMove model. The proposed model is verified and evaluated through extensive experiments based on a real-world trajectory dataset covering sections of an expressway and national and provincial highways. From the experimental results, we conclude that the HVMove model provides sufficient accuracy and efficiency for automated heavy-duty trucks and advanced driver assistance system applications. In addition, HVMove can generate maps with the elevation information marked automatically.