Data fusion applied on autonomous ground vehicles

Accurate environment sensing has become crucial in various domains ranging from remote control, remote collaboration, navigation in autonomous vehicles and disaster prevention systems. The common characteristics for these applications are: diverse sensors operating at different rates resulting in the heterogeneity of data sources, constant processing time constraints, and real-time decision making processes based on the collected information. A reliable data fusion model must address each of these requirements and must allow the user to constantly monitor the flow of data in the framework. This paper proposes a hierarchical model for data fusion using real time objects and an application program interface (API)