Vehicle localization via cooperative channel mapping

This paper addresses vehicle positioning, a topic whose importance has risen dramatically in the context of future autonomous driving systems. While classical methods that use GPS and/or beacon signals from network infrastructure for triangulation tend to be sensitive to multi-paths and signal obstruction, our method exhibits robustness with respect to such phenomena. Our approach builds on the recently proposed Channel-SLAM method which first enabled leveraging of multipath so as to improve (single) vehicle positioning. Here, we propose a cooperative mapping approach which builds upon the Channel-SLAM concept, referred to here as Team ChannelSLAM. Team Channel-SLAM not only exploits the stationary nature of many reflecting objects around the vehicle, but also capitalizes on the multi-vehicle nature of road traffic. The key intuition behind our method is the exploitation for the first time of the correlation between reflectors around multiple neighboring vehicles. An algorithm is derived for reflector selection and estimation, combined with a team particle filter (TPF) so as to achieve high precision simultaneous multiple vehicle positioning. We obtain large improvement over the single-vehicle positioning scenario, with gains being already noticeable for moderate vehicle densities, such as over 40% improvement for a vehicle density as low as 4 vehicles in 132 meters’ length road.