Grid-based online road model estimation for advanced driver assistance systems

The information about the road course and individual lanes is an important requirement in driver assistance systems and for automated driving applications. It is often stored in a highly accurate offline map so that the road and the lanes are known in advance. However, there exist situations where an offline map can become unusable or invalid. This paper presents a novel approach for a road model estimation solely based on online measurements from sensors mounted on the ego vehicle. It combines perception data like detected lane markings, the movement history of dynamic objects in the vehicle's environment and detected road boundaries into a grid-based road model. This approach allows for an estimation of the road model even when one source of information is not available and offers a redundant source of information about the road, which is necessary in critical applications such as automated driving. The presented approach was tested and evaluated with a prototype vehicle and real sensor data from German highway scenarios.