Laser scanner based road surface estimation for automotive applications

Driver Assistance Systems and Active Suspension Systems require the accurate perception of the vehicle's environment. In the case of Active Suspension Systems the road surface in front of the wheels has to be reconstructed with an accuracy of few centimeters. In this work we present a new method to generate the relevant road height information based on an automotive compact laser scanner mounted in the car's radiator grill and originally designed for Driver Assistance Systems. Our method is based on the generation of a statistical and a deterministic sensor model which permits to precisely extract the ground height from the raw distance measurements. Additionally, the concept of the corridor representation is introduced. It efficiently processes the 3D data in the relevant areas and integrates past measurements enabling for the first time the representation of long road waves despite limited sensor range. Experimental results based on the comparison of the output of our method with the ground truth of a roadway ramp show the suitability of the presented work.