NAV-CAR 2: Improved Navigation in Challenging Areas by Robust Positioning

NAV-CAR 2 aims at making car navigation more robust while at the same time providing more accurate and precise information compared to existing navigation solutions. The focus lies on more accurate robust positioning and map referencing in order to be able to provide lane specific positioning information for traffic and navigation information services.

Short Description

NAV-CAR 2 is a national research project, co-financed by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology within the 6 th call of ASAP (Austrian Space Applications Programme).

Challenges

Current satellite based vehicle information, navigation and tolling systems rely on a minimum number of satellites that are both visible and well distributed to compute geo-reference data at the accuracy promised by the operators. Nevertheless, specific environments such as urban canyons, woodlands and mountainous regions very often do not fulfill the requirements for a continuous and reliable satellite connection of the navigation system leading either to wrong positional data or no data at all.

Solution

Positional information from navigational satellites is augmented by data collected using an in-car sensor network and combined with high precision map data. This in-vehicle process will not only allow the correction of the signal provided by the navigation satellites but also to substitute missing signals, which may occur in tunnels, urban canyons and mountainous areas.

NAV-CAR 2

builds on experiences made in the European IST-project COOPERS (www.coopers-ip.eu) and the know-how of pwp- systems in the field of high-precision car navigation and simulation. Within NAV-CAR 2 this know-how is used and enlarged especially in the realm of sensor data fusion and map referencing.

Innovation

The innovative part of NAV-CAR 2 is the data fusion of navigational and in-car-sensor data to provide robust, accurate and precise positioning information. In combination with precise map data, which will be generated in the course of NAV-CAR 2 for the proposed test sites (urban motorway Vienna, Brenner motorway), lane sensitive navigation and information will be demonstrated.

In-car data (e.g. from CAN-bus) are used to calculate a delta position from the last measured satellite positioning signal. The main problem to be resolved is to find suitable interfaces for data fusion and to utilize all available sources of information in an innovative manner.

Project Partners

Coordinator

AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH - Erwin Schoitsch

Partners

AIT Austrian Institute of Technology, Österreichisches Forschungs- und Prüfzentrum Arsenal Ges.m.b.H. - Roland Spielhofer
BRIMATECH Services GmbH - Susanne Fuchs
EFKON AG - Hannes Stratil

Contact Address

AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH
Erwin Schoitsch
Donau-City-Straße 1
A-1220 Vienna
Tel.: +43 (505) 50 4117
E-mail: erwin.schoitsch.fl@ait.ac.at
Web: www.ait.ac.at