State and existence estimation with out-of-sequence measurements for a collision avoidance system

As their functionality becomes more and more complex, future driver assistance systems rely on several different sensors in order to combine the advantages of different measurement principles. However, in multi-sensor fusion, measurements may arrive at the fusion unit out-of-sequence, the original order of the measurements may be lost. Whereas out-of-sequence measurement processing in state estimation has been studied extensively, their incorporation in existence estimation has not been solved in the past. This paper presents a new algorithm for state and existence estimation in time-critical applications, where out-of-sequence measurements are handled adequately. The derived algorithm is validated with real-world data from crash tests.