Design a Novel Target to Improve Positioning Accuracy of Autonomous Vehicular Navigation System in GPS Denied Environments

Accurate positioning is an essential requirement of autonomous vehicular navigation system (AVNS) for safe driving. Although the vehicle position can be obtained in global position system friendly environments, in GPS denied environments (such as suburb, tunnel, forest, or underground scenarios) the positioning accuracy of AVNS is easily reduced by the trajectory error of the vehicle. In order to solve this problem, the plane, sphere, cylinder and cone are often selected as the ground control targets to eliminate the trajectory error for AVNS. However, these targets usually suffer from the limitations of incidence angle, measuring range, scanning resolution, and point cloud density, etc. To bridge this research gap, an adaptive continuum shape constraint analysis (ACSCA) method is presented in this article to design a new target with optimized identifiable specific shape to eliminate the trajectory error for AVNS. First of all, according to the proposed ACSCA method, we conduct extensive numerical simulations to explore the optimal ranges of the vertexes and the faces for target shape design, and based on these trials, the optimal target shape is found as icosahedron, which composes of ten vertexes, 20 faces and combines the properties of plane and volume target. Moreover, the algorithm of automatic detection and coordinate calculation is developed to recognize the icosahedron target and calculate its coordinates information for AVNS. Finally, a series of experimental investigation were performed to evaluate the effectiveness of the designed icosahedron target in GPS denied environments. The experimental results demonstrate that compared with the plane, sphere, cylinder and cone targets, the developed icosahedron target can produce better performances than the above targets in terms of the clustered minimum registration error, ambiguity and range of field-of-view; also can significantly improve the positioning accuracy of AVNS in GPS denied environments.