Building GIS for Unmanned Ground Vehicles in the urban traffic environment

As an important research field of Intelligent Transport System(ITS), Unmanned Ground Vehicles(UGV) can lessen traffic accidents and relieve traffic congestion by high intelligence, thereby improving the efficiency of the entire ITS. More and more complex urban traffic environment forces UGV to perceive a lot of environmental information, and the Geographic Information System (GIS) has strong capabilities of storage and management for geographic information. Therefore, a new method for constructing GIS database is proposed in this paper, which combines the characteristics of urban traffic and needs for perceiving the environment of UGV, to assist UGV in moving in the urban traffic environment autonomously. Firstly, Google Earth is used to create the city map. Secondly, an urban road network model is proposed and the GIS database of urban traffic environment is constructed based on the model. Finally, the GIS database is used to achieve the least-time route based on improved Dijkstra algorithm. Meanwhile, the GIS database can provide the attributive information of roads in the real vehicle experiment, which guides UGV to perceive the environment quickly. Experiments have shown that the proposed GIS database performs well in assisting UGV to move autonomously in the urban traffic environment.