Cars that look around to work out where they are

YOU are driving home when your car screeches to a halt under a bridge. It hasn't broken down, it's just lost. If driverless cars are going to navigate safely, they need to know exactly where they are all the time ? and if they rely on GPS they are likely to lose their bearings every time they enter a tunnel, go past a skyscraper or drive under a bridge. Now a new system can pin down the location of a travelling car to within 3 metres without the aid of GPS ? just by looking around.

The geolocation system, designed by Marcus Brubaker and colleagues at the Toyota Technological Institute in Chicago, uses two simple cameras mounted on the car that survey its surroundings as the vehicle drives along. Software uses this camera data to work out when the road curves or is straight and then compares the layout of the route and its intersections to a map of the area from OpenStreetMap, a crowdsourced mapping application. An inexpensive onboard motion sensor helps tell when the car has changed direction.

As the cameras pass by an increasing number of streets, the system eliminates the locations on the map that don't match up until it has worked out exactly where it is. On average, this process is completed after just 20 seconds of driving.

This method may sound too simplistic to work on the exact grids of a metropolis like New York, but according to Brubaker, it can pick up on the small differences in the size of each city block to pinpoint location accurately ? even in Manhattan.

When it was tested out on maps covering 2150 kilometres of roads within the city of Karlsruhe in Germany, the system placed the car to within 3 metres of its actual position as measured by a GPS unit.

Brubaker unveiled the GPS-free system at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference in Portland, Oregon, last month.

Junsung Kim, who works on autonomous vehicles at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, says the paper is promising but that even better accuracy will be needed to ensure that vehicles know which lane they are travelling in.

"Self-localisation without a GPS is one of the most important technologies to make autonomous driving part of everyday lives," says Kim.

This article appeared in print under the headline "The driverless car with its own sense of direction"

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