Highway Evaluation of Terrain-Aided Localization Using Particle Filters

This work evaluates a real-time algorithm to localize a vehicle on a highway in the direction of travel without the use of GPS. The algorithm uses a particle filter to estimate vehicle position along a map of road grade using real-time pitch measurements from an in-vehicle pitch sensor as the input. Experiments over 60 kilometers along Interstate I-80 and US Route 220 in Pennsylvania are used to demonstrate the algorithm, observe the speed of convergence, and evaluate several methods of implementation. The results indicate that the method can localize a vehicle with a position accuracy of 5 meters after traveling about 1 kilometer within the 60 kilometer map.