Automatic vehicle location using sensory maps: a brief demonstration

The ability to perform automatic vehicle location (AVL) is a requirement for a variety of applications in intelligent transportation systems like vehicle guidance, dynamic route optimization, scheduling, bus stop annunciation, security, fleet tracking, etc. We describe a new approach to AVL where data from a simple low-bandwidth sensor producing 1-dimensional visual data is matched against a stored database to determine position, in combination with standard dead-reckoning. Our system is completely self-contained in that it requires no infrastructure external to the vehicle such as beacons or satellites.