Joint ego-motion and road geometry estimation

We provide a sensor fusion framework for solving the problem of joint ego-motion and road geometry estimation. More specifically we employ a sensor fusion framework to make systematic use of the measurements from a forward looking radar and camera, steering wheel angle sensor, wheel speed sensors and inertial sensors to compute good estimates of the road geometry and the motion of the ego vehicle on this road. In order to solve this problem we derive dynamical models for the ego vehicle, the road and the leading vehicles. The main difference to existing approaches is that we make use of a new dynamic model for the road. An extended Kalman filter is used to fuse data and to filter measurements from the camera in order to improve the road geometry estimate. The proposed solution has been tested and compared to existing algorithms for this problem, using measurements from authentic traffic environments on public roads in Sweden. The results clearly indicate that the proposed method provides better estimates. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.