Extracting Mobile Machine Routes from GPS Traces

Abstract GPS data are available from a large amount of sources. Individuals and vehicles carry their receivers and are often willing to share their locations. These GPS traces are inexpensive compared to dedicated collection techniques. Therefore, using GPS traces in map extraction has attracted a number of researchers in the past decade. In the case of mobile machines, dedicated collection of GPS data is usually even impossible, so one has to confine to the data collected by the machine itself. This paper introduces an algorithm for extracting a map-like graph from mobile machine GPS traces with large uncertainties. The result is a topological map with intersections and route segments. It can be used for operator support instead of displaying the raw GPS traces, or information interchange between operators. In the future, even automatic route optimization is possible with the help of a graph like this.