Precise Vehicle Localization Using 3D LIDAR and GPS/DR in Urban Environment

GPS provides the positioning solution in most areas of the world. However, the position error largely occurs in the urban area due to signal attenuation, signal blockage, and multipath. Although many studies have been carried out to solve this problem, a definite solution has not yet been proposed. Therefore, research is being conducted to solve the vehicle localization problem in the urban environment by converging sensors such as cameras and Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR). In this paper, the precise vehicle localization using 3D LIDAR (Velodyne HDL-32E) is performed in the urban area. As there are many tall buildings in the urban area and the outer walls of urban buildings consist of planes generally perpendicular to the earth's surface, the outer wall of the building meets at a vertical corner and this vertical corner can be accurately extracted using 3D LIDAR. In this paper, we describe the vertical corner extraction method using 3D LIDAR and perform the precise localization by combining the extracted corner position and GPS/DR information. The driving test was carried out in an about 4.5 km-long section near Teheran-ro, Gangnam. The lateral and longitudinal RMS position errors were 0.146 m and 0.286 m, respectively and showed very accurate localization performance.