Tight integration of digital map and in-vehicle positioning unit for car navigation in urban areas

Now GPS has been widely used for land, sea and air navigation.However, due to signal blockage and severe multipath environments in urban areas, such as in Hong Kong, GPS alone can not satisfy most land vehicle navigation requirements. Dead Reckoning (DR) systems have been widely used to bridge the gaps of GPS and to smooth GPS position errors. However,the DR drift errors increase with time rapidly and frequent calibration is required. Under the normal situation, GPS is sufficient to provide the calibration to the DR unit. However, GPS may not be available in urban areas for more than 20 min, and the DR position errors can reach hundreds of meters during the period. As land vehicles have to be on roads, digital map can be used to constrain the locations of vehicles, known as map-matching.One of the main problems for map-matching techniques is mis-matching, that may be caused by the positioning sensor errors and the complexity of city road network. In this paper, a newly developed model to tightly integrate digital map and in-vehicle positioning unit for car navigation is introduced.With this method, it improves the position accuracy by constraining the vehicle location on the roads. Moreover it provides the close-loop controls for the DR drift errors by feeding back the coordinates of the feature points of the road network and road bearings to the DR unit and therefore the navigation system can be used for longer period when GPS is not available.Extensive tests have been carried out in Hong Kong. It demonstrates that this close-loop approach is much better on the reliability of map-matching, as the positioning sensor errors are constantly calibrated by the digital map.