Vehicle 3D localization in mountainous woodland environments

This paper presents an approach for vehicle 3D localization in outdoor woodland environments using a loosely coupled multisensor system. The vehicle 3D dead reckoning is computed using a wheel encoder and an IMU. Dead reckoning is corrected from three different sources: a) using a tilted lidar for road detection and computation of the vehicle position within the road which is then corrected towards a 2D road centerline map given in advance. b) DGPS 2D or 3D data as available. c) Under tree foliage DGPS blackouts commonly occur, specially when measuring height, therefore the use of a barometer for correcting height is proposed. An extended Kalman filter is used for sensor fusion and pose estimation. Finally, the estimated vehicle height is added to the 2D map obtaining a 3D road centerline map with width (measured by the tilted lidar). Thoroughly experimentation on real mountainous woodland paths show the usefulness and robustness of the proposed approach.