Sensor Fusion for Automotive Applications

Sammanfattning: Mapping stationary objects and tracking moving targets are essential for many autonomous functions in vehicles. In order to compute the map and track estimates, sensor measurements from radar, laser and camera are used together with the standard proprioceptive sensors present in a car. By fusing information from different types of sensors, the accuracy and robustness of the estimates can be increased.Different types of maps are discussed and compared in the thesis. In particular, road maps make use of the fact that roads are highly structured, which allows relatively simple and powerful models to be employed. It is shown how the information of the lane markings, obtained by a front looking camera, can be fused with inertial measurement of the vehicle motion and radar measurements of vehicles ahead to compute a more accurate and robust road geometry estimate. Further, it is shown how radar measurements of stationary targets can be used to estimate the road edges, modeled as polynomials and tracked as extended targets.Recent advances in the field of multiple target tracking lead to the use of finite set statistics (FISST) in a set theoretic approach, where the targets and the measurements are treated as random finite sets (RFS). The first order moment of a RFS is called probability hypothesis density (PHD), and it is propagated in time with a PHD filter. In this thesis, the PHD filter is applied to radar data for constructing a parsimonious representation of the map of the stationary objects around the vehicle. Two original contributions, which exploit the inherent structure in the map, are proposed. A data clustering algorithm is suggested to structure the description of the prior and considerably improving the update in the PHD filter. Improvements in the merging step further simplify the map representation.When it comes to tracking moving targets, the focus of this thesis is on extended targets, i.e., targets which potentially may give rise to more than one measurement per time step. An implementation of the PHD filter, which was proposed to handle data obtained from extended targets, is presented. An approximation is proposed in order to limit the number of hypotheses. Further, a framework to track the size and shape of a target is introduced. The method is based on measurement generating points on the surface of the target, which are modeled by an RFS.Finally, an efficient and novel Bayesian method is proposed for approximating the tire radii of a vehicle based on particle filters and the marginalization concept. This is done under the assumption that a change in the tire radius is caused by a change in tire pressure, thus obtaining an indirect tire pressure monitoring system.The approaches presented in this thesis have all been evaluated on real data from both freeways and rural roads in Sweden.