Dynamical tracking of surrounding objects for road vehicles using linearly-arrayed ultrasonic sensors

Accurate detection and tracking of traffic participants are crucial to advanced driver assistance systems. This paper presents a centralized object tracking approach for surrounding objects in road traffic environments by using multiple linearly arrayed ultrasonic sensors. An ultrasonic sensor model is specifically developed for traffic environment, which consists of detection scope, chance of detection and ranging error, incorporating factors of object shapes, materials, distances and orientations. A centralized filter is designed to selectively fuse new measurements that are obtained using the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) from certain sensors to conduct object tracking at each step. The effectiveness of proposed method is validated by simulations, which is found to have superior tracking performance compared to traditional triangle localization method, with more stable and smaller tracking error, especially when the object is entering or leaving the detection area.