Analysis of Information Fusion for Low Cost, Precise and Reliable Vehicular Cooperative Positioning with DSRC

Information from digital maps and measurements from a low cost digital compass and the vehicle ABS odometer can be fused with those available from an onboard GPS receiver to bridge the outages frequently experienced by GPS when navigating in urban environments. This fusion strategy can also be used to improve the positioning accuracy of GPS. The emergence of infrastructure such as dedicated short range communications (DSRC) allows us to establish ad hoc vehicular networks in which range measurements between the moving vehicles can be measured and included as part of the integrated positioning solution. All these information sources together form a platform for robust position estimation that can meet the strict performance requirements of a range of road safety systems and services. In this paper, a Cramer Rao Lower Bound analysis is performed to describe the performance of such a comprehensive cooperative positioning system.