Cooperative Range Estimation and Sensor Diagnostics for Vehicle Control

An integrated sensor fusion and fault diagnostic for the cooperative estimation of range and range rate in automated vehicles is presented in this paper. A virtual range sensor created by combining local sensor measurements and a wireless communication link between vehicles is fused with measurements from a Doppler radar and lidar. The sensor fusion is conducted by using a sequential variant of the nonparametric probabilistic data association filter with validation gating. Fault diagnostics are incorporated into the sensor fusion by thresholding the Mahalanobis distance computed in the validation stage. Performance of the integrated system is verified and demonstrated using experimental data obtained from low-speed vehicle following tests.Copyright © 2003 by ASME