Vehicle self-localization with high-precision digital maps

Cooperative driver assistance functions benefit from sharing information on the local environments of individual road users by means of communication technology and advanced sensor data fusion methods. However, the consistent integration of environment models as well as the subsequent interpretation of traffic situations impose high requirements on the self-localization accuracy of vehicles. This paper presents methods and models for a map-based vehicle self-localization approach. Basically, information from the vehicular environment perception (using a monocular camera and laser scanner) is associated with data of a high-precision digital map in order to deduce the vehicle's position. Within the Monte-Carlo localization approach, the association of road markings is reduced to a prototype fitting problem which can be solved efficiently due to a map model based on smooth arc splines. Experiments on a rural road show that the localization approach reaches a global positioning accuracy in both lateral and longitudinal direction significantly below one meter and an orientation accuracy below one degree even at a speed up to 100 km/h in real-time.