Terrain Aided Localization of Autonomous Vehicles

Abstract

This paper describes the development of a terrain-aided localization framework for autonomous land vehicles operating at high speeds in unstructured, expansive and harsh environments. The localization framework developed is sufficiently generic to be used on a variety of other autonomous land vehicles and is demonstrated by its implementation using field data collected from two different trials on two different vehicles. The results demonstrate the robustness of the proposed localization algorithms in producing reliable and accurate position estimates for autonomous vehicles operating in a variety of unstructured domains.