Reliable Evaluation of Navigation States Estimation for Automated Driving Systems

Abstract

To achieve a higher level of automation for modern development in automated driving systems (ADS), reliable evaluation of navigation states estimation is crucial demand. Although the presence of several approaches on evaluation are presented, but no study has examined problems related to establish a trustable reference system for fully evaluating performance of ADS. This paper proposes new strategies for better handling with the ground truth system for full navigation evaluation with automated driving applications. The first strategy involves making use of the integration solutions of an inertial measurement unit (IMU) and global navigation satellite system (GNSS) as an initial pose for normal distribution transform (NDT) with high-definition (HD) point cloud map. An accurate LiDAR-based navigation estimation could be then achieved. In the second strategy, LiDAR-based position is used as the measurements to update with the loosely coupled (LC)INS/GNSS/LiDAR integration system. The preliminary results indicate that the proposed LC-INS/GNSS/LiDAR strategy not only estimates full navigation solutions, but also seems to provide more accurate and reliable for evaluating the positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) services compared to conventional methods.