Digital Maps for Driving Assistance Systems and Autonomous Driving

Modern passenger vehicles increasingly incorporate perception systems that allow the deployment of advanced driving assistance systems which in turn shall led to highly automated systems and ultimately to autonomous vehicles. Despite the numerous advances in sensors and communications technologies applied to passenger vehicles, perception remains a major challenge due to the complexity of the task, the vehicle geometric constraints and cost. Digital navigation maps have proven themselves to be essential for driver guidance and have replaced paper maps. They store the geometric description of roads and associated features. Due to the limits of perception systems, errors occur on the understanding and relevance of the detected objects, when using multiple sensors discordances occur that lead to unknowns. By projecting sensor information from the perceived environment into digital navigation maps, information can be contextualized. The resulting representation of the world is much easier to interpret by a machine, but also to ensure the coherence of the perceived information.