Co-operative vehicle localization algorithm — Evaluation of the CoVeL approach

Accurate, reliable and affordable vehicle localization is still in the focus of current research. As the sensor budget of a vehicle is limited, new approaches to improve the positioning accuracy have to be exploited. In general, urban environment further increases the number of factors affecting the performance of a system. However, the often irregular and non-repeating structure the road network creates new aspects to address the localization problem. One cost-efficient method is to incorporate digital maps to perform some kind of map matching. Furthermore, vehicle-to-vehicle communication can be used to exchange information about the relative position of the vehicles, which in turn can also be used to improve the ego positioning. One approach on co-operative positioning has been elaborated in the European Project CoVeL and was already published. While previous work was to a significant extend based on simulated data, the final paper at hand presents results based on real world data. With a fleet of six vehicles, the cooperative localization algorithm has been evaluated under real world conditions on open public roads. The algorithmic results were compared to Ground Truth data from a high-accuracy and high-availability GPS/INS reference system.