Lidar-Assisted Hitch Angle Estimation System for Self-Driving Truck

Level-4 autonomous trucks are essential for operating in challenging real-world environments. Accurate estimation of the hitch angle in the tractor-trailer system is crucial for safe maneuvering. Traditional sensor-based measurement techniques for estimating the hitch angle can be complex and expensive. To address this challenge, we propose a lidar-assisted hitch angle estimation (HAE) approach, leveraging existing two-sided lidars installed on the tractor. Overcoming challenges related to accurate lidar extrinsic calibration, time synchronization, online calibration of the trailer’s hitch point, and robustness to environmental changes, our system achieves highly accurate and robust HAE, even in adverse conditions. Our contributions include introducing a novel lidar-assisted HAE system, successfully implementing it in real-time level4 self-driving trucks, and curating a challenging real-world dataset for comprehensive evaluation and benchmarking of HAE in autonomous driving systems.