Situational awareness and road prediction for trajectory control applications

This chapter is concerned with the problem of estimating a map of the immediate surroundings of a vehicle as it moves. In order to compute these map estimates sensor measurements from radars, lasers and/or cameras are used together with the standard proprioceptive sensors present in a car. Four different types of maps are discussed. Feature based maps are represented by a set of salient features. Road maps make use of the fact that roads are highly structured, since they are built according to clearly specified road construction standards, which allows relatively simple and powerful models of the road to be employed. Location based maps, where occupancy grid maps belong and finally intensity based maps, which can be viewed as a continuous version of the location based maps. The aim is to provide a self-contained presentation of how these maps can be built from measurements. Real data from Swedish roads are used throughout the chapter to illustrate the methods introduced.