Robust Localization for Intelligent Vehicles Based on Pole-Like Features Using the Point Cloud

Localization in the complex urban environment is an open problem for current methods. The occlusion from dynamic objects, such as vehicles and pedestrians, degenerates the precision of the localization result. This article proposes a pole-like feature-based localization framework to solve this problem. Pole-like objects, such as posts of lamps or traffic sign and tree trunks, widely exist in the urban environment and are robust to occlusion, as they are usually higher than the objects on the road. First, this type of feature is extracted from the point cloud by a robust clustering algorithm. Then, the features from different frames of data are stitched to generate a feature map. For online localization, a Monte Carlo localization (MCL) framework is used to fuse the vehicle motion data and the map-matching result. An improved version of iterative closest point (ICP) that is specifically designed for the pole-like feature association is used for map matching based on the state of every particle. With the MCL scheme, localization is robust to the local minimum or robot kidnapping problem. Experimental results in the real urban environment demonstrate the precision and robustness of the proposed method, with mean absolute errors less than 0.20 m and 0.5 degrees. The results also show that the proposed method outperforms some state-of-the-art localization methods in the complex urban environment.