A New Approach for Autonomous Vehicle Navigation in Urban Scenarios based on Roadway Magnets

Magnetic guidance is a commonly used vehicle navigation solution in real applications due to its reliability. The vehicle control of magnetic guidance, however, is difficult because of the look-down property of road detecting sensors. This paper proposes a curvature map based approach to realize look-ahead control for magnetic guidance used in urban scenarios. The basis of the approach is a magnet tracking algorithm, which makes it possible to calculate the curvature of the passed road. The tracking algorithm is used not only to localize the vehicle but also to build the curvature map of the reference trajectory. Once the magnetic ruler detects a magnet, a magnet tracker is initialized and tracks the magnet in the vehicle coordinate. Then these tracking results combined with the curvature map are used to predict the upcoming road's curvature. The curvature map is obtained by running the tracking algorithm when the vehicle is driving along the magnetic trajectory by hand. Compared with existing methods, the algorithm predominates in implementation and robustness. Experiments on real application scenario have verified the effectiveness of the proposed idea.