Concepts and technology for navigation equipment

The author reviews technology for supporting automated vehicle navigation. This technology ranges from simple map displays showing the current location of the vehicle to complex interactions between onboard electronics and a supporting infrastructure to provide intelligent guidance on the selection of driving routes. It is concluded that an infrastructure-intensive route guidance environment does not provide the functionality, the reliability, the flexibility, the coverage, or the performance that is necessary to make in-vehicle navigation viable in the marketplace. It is further concluded that distributed route guidance does provide these characteristics, using proven technology, at significantly lower costs than central systems