Terrain-Aided Localization Using Feature-Based Particle Filtering

The localization of vehicles on roadways without the use of a GPS has been of great interest in recent years and a number of solutions have been proposed for the same. The localization of vehicles has traditionally been divided by their solution approaches into two different categories: global localization which uses feature-vector matching, and local tracking which has been dealt by using techniques like Particle Filtering or Kalman Filtering. This paper proposes a unifying approach that combines the feature-based robustness of global search with the local tracking capabilities of a particle filter. Using feature vectors produced from pitch measurements from Interstate I-80 and US Route 220 in Pennsylvania, this work demonstrates wide area localization of a vehicle with the computational efficiency of local tracking.