Leveraging FMCW-Radar for Autonomous Positioning Systems: Methodology and Application in Downtown Toronto

Marwan A. Rashed, Ashraf Abosekeen, Hany Ragab, Aboelmagd Noureldin, Michael J. Korenberg

Abstract: The industry of land vehicles entered a new era. In which, driving autonomy is the main goal. It caused a rising demand of more accurate driving systems. Vehicle’s positioning technologies play an important role in such systems. It is one of the main pillars in the autonomous perception task. Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) has been always used as the main navigation solution provider. However, the GNSS is subjected for several sources of errors. Signal blockage and multi-path issues take place in urban canyons and downtowns of large cities. Such problems showed the weakness of GNSS solution in critical places. Therefore, Inertial Navigation Systems (INS) were used for long time to provide the navigation information during GNSS outages. A specific INS type with lower number of sensors and high effectiveness for land vehicles named three-dimensional reduced inertial sensor system (3DRISS) has been widely considered and used. The 3D-RISS is integrated with GNSS to acquire accurate information. An integration that is mostly carried out by an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF). Such solution which can show magnificent performances in open skies. However, in GNSS outages the integrated system has to rely only on the solution provided by the 3D-RISS. Despite the fidelity of 3D-RISS measurements in short-term outages, it suffers from a vast drift in inertial sensor errors for long-term. As a result, ramping up the system for higher multi-sensor fusion integration is a necessity. The solution proposed depends on integrating an FMCW Radar used almost in all levels of driving autonomy with the 3D-RISS/GNSS system. The methodology used was experimented during natural outage periods in downtown Toronto. The difficulty of the area and the nature of the GNSS outages show the fidelity of Radar/RISS/GNSS proposed method.
Published in: Proceedings of the 32nd International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2019)
September 16 - 20, 2019
Hyatt Regency Miami
Miami, Florida
Pages: 2659 - 2669
Cite this article: Rashed, Marwan A., Abosekeen, Ashraf, Ragab, Hany, Noureldin, Aboelmagd, Korenberg, Michael J., "Leveraging FMCW-Radar for Autonomous Positioning Systems: Methodology and Application in Downtown Toronto," Proceedings of the 32nd International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2019), Miami, Florida, September 2019, pp. 2659-2669. https://doi.org/10.33012/2019.17096
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