Heading Estimation Based on Magnetic Markers for Intelligent Vehicles

This paper presents a new real-time heading estimation method for an all-wheel steered single-articulated autonomous vehicle guided by a magnetic marker system. To achieve good guidance control for the vehicle, precise estimation of the position and heading angle during travel is necessary. The main concept of this study is to estimate the heading angle from the relative orientations of the magnetic markers and the vehicle motion. To achieve this, a kinematic model of the all-wheel steered vehicle is derived and combined with the motion of a magnetic ruler mounted near each axle underneath the vehicle. The position coordinates and polarities of the magnetic markers, which are provided a priori, are used to determine the vehicle position at every detection instance. A gyroscope is employed to assist real-time heading estimation at sample times when there are no marker detection data. The proposed method was tested on a real vehicle and evaluated by comparing the experimental results with those of the differential global positioning system (DGPS) in real-time kinematics (RTK) mode. Experimental results show that the proposed method exhibits good performance for heading estimation.