This works describes an approach to lane-precise localization on current digital maps. A particle filter fuses data from production vehicle sensors, such as GPS, radar, and camera. Performance evaluations on more than 200 km of data show that the proposed algorithm can reliably determine the current lane. Furthermore, a possible architecture for an intuitive route guidance system based on Augmented Reality is proposed together with a lane-change recommendation for unclear situations.

This works describes an approach to lane-precise localization on current digital maps. A particle filter fuses data from production vehicle sensors, such as GPS, radar, and camera. Performance evaluations on more than 200 km of data show that the proposed algorithm can reliably determine the current lane. Furthermore, a possible architecture for an intuitive route guidance system based on Augmented Reality is proposed together with a lane-change recommendation for unclear situations. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.

In motion planning for automated vehicles, a thorough uncertainty consideration is crucial to facilitate safe and convenient driving behavior. This work presents three motion planning approaches which are targeted towards the predominant uncertainties in different scenarios, along with an extended safety verification framework. The approaches consider uncertainties from imperfect perception, occlusions and limited sensor range, and also those in the behavior of other traffic participants.

This work develops a motion planner that compensates the deficiencies from perception modules by exploiting the reaction capabilities of a vehicle. The work analyzes present uncertainties and defines driving objectives together with constraints that ensure safety. The resulting problem is solved in real-time, in two distinct ways: first, with nonlinear optimization, and secondly, by framing it as a partially observable Markov decision process and approximating the solution with sampling.

This work presents a behavior planning algorithm for automated driving in urban environments with an uncertain and dynamic nature. The algorithm allows to consider the prediction uncertainty (e.g. different intentions), perception uncertainty (e.g. occlusions) as well as the uncertain interactive behavior of the other agents explicitly. Simulating the most likely future scenarios allows to find an optimal policy online that enables non-conservative planning under uncertainty.

This work proposes novel approaches for object tracking in challenging scenarios like severe occlusion, deteriorated vision and long range multi-object reidenti?cation. All these solutions are only based on image sequence captured by a monocular camera and do not require additional sensors. Experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate an improved state-of-the-art performance of these approaches. Since all the presented approaches are smartly designed, they can run at a real-time speed.

Estimating the pose (position and attitude) in real-time is a key function for road autonomous vehicles. This thesis aims at studying vehicle localization performance using low cost automotive sensors. Three kinds of sensors are considered : dead reckoning (DR) sensors that already exist in modern vehicles, mono-frequency GNSS (Global navigation satellite system) receivers with patch antennas and a frontlooking lane detection camera. Highly accurate maps enhanced with road features are also key components for autonomous vehicle navigation. In this work, a lane marking map with decimeter-level accuracy is considered. The localization problem is studied in a local East-North-Up (ENU) working frame. Indeed, the localization outputs are used in real-time as inputs to a path planner and a motion generator to make a valet vehicle able to drive autonomously at low speed with nobody on-board the car. The use of a lane detection camera makes possible to exploit lane marking information stored in the georeferenced map. A lane marking detection module detects the vehicle's host lane and provides the lateral distance between the detected lane marking and the vehicle. The camera is also able to identify the type of the detected lane markings (e.g., solid or dashed). Since the camera gives relative measurements, the important step is to link the measures with the vehicle's state. A refined camera observation model is proposed. It expresses the camera metric measurements as a function of the vehicle's state vector and the parameters of the detected lane markings. However, the use of a camera alone has some limitations. For example, lane markings can be missing in some parts of the navigation area and the camera sometimes fails to detect the lane markings in particular at cross-roads. GNSS, which is mandatory for cold start initialization, can be used also continuously in the multi-sensor localization system as done often when GNSS compensates for the DR drift. GNSS positioning errors can't be modeled as white noises in particular with low cost mono-frequency receivers working in a standalone way, due to the unknown delays when the satellites signals cross the atmosphere and real-time satellites orbits errors. GNSS can also be affected by strong biases which are mainly due to multipath effect. This thesis studies GNSS biases shaping models that are used in the localization solver by augmenting the state vector. An abrupt bias due to multipath is seen as an outlier that has to be rejected by the filter. Depending on the information flows between the GNSS receiver and the other components of the localization system, data-fusion architectures are commonly referred to as loosely coupled (GNSS fixes and velocities) and tightly coupled (raw pseudoranges and Dopplers for the satellites in view). This thesis investigates both approaches. In particular, a road-invariant approach is proposed to handle a refined modeling of the GNSS error in the loosely coupled approach since the camera can only improve the localization performance in the lateral direction of the road. Finally, this research discusses some map-matching issues for instance when the uncertainty domain of the vehicle state becomes large if the camera is blind. It is challenging in this case to distinguish between different lanes when the camera retrieves lane marking measurements.As many outdoor experiments have been carried out with equipped vehicles, every problem addressed in this thesis is evaluated with real data. The different studied approaches that perform the data fusion of DR, GNSS, camera and lane marking map are compared and several conclusions are drawn on the fusion architecture choice.