Fusion of Map and Sensor Data in a Modern Car Navigation System

The main tasks of car navigation systems are positioning, routing, and guidance. This paper describes a novel, two-step approach to vehicle positioning founded on the appropriate combination of the in-car sensors, GPS signals, and a digital map. The first step is based on the application of a Kalman filter, which optimally updates the model of car movement based on the in-car odometer and gyroscope measurements, and the GPS signal. The second step further improves the position estimate by dynamically comparing the continuous vehicle trajectory obtained in the first step with the candidate trajectories on a digital map. This is in contrast with standard applications of the digital map where the current position estimate is simply projected on the digital map at every sampling instant.