Autonomous vehicle global navigation approach associating sensor based control and digital maps

This paper proposes a global navigation strategy for autonomous vehicle combining sensor based control and digital maps information. In order to avoid localization problems in urban environments, this approach intends to solve the global navigation focusing on two local navigation tasks: road lane following and road intersection maneuvers. For that, it is important to use digital maps, once they provide a rich database containing information about the environment structure, like speed limit, number of lanes, traffic directions, etc. Associating the data extracted from the digital map with local navigation approaches, the vehicle is able to perform its global navigation task. The experiments take into account real data and a simulated scenario, which show the viability of this approach.