Baobao Jin

Along with the rapid development of advanced driving assistance systems for intelligent vehicles, essential functions such as forward collision warning and collaborative cruise control need to detect the relative positions of surrounding vehicles. This paper proposes a relative planar localization system based on the ultra-wideband (UWB) ranging technology. Three UWB modules are installed on the top of each vehicle. Because of the limited space on the vehicle roof compared with the ranging error, the traditional triangulation method leads to significant positioning errors. Therefore, an optimal localization algorithm combining homotopy and the Levenberg–Marquardt method is first proposed to enhance the precision. The triangular side lengths and directed area are introduced as constraints. Secondly, a UWB sensor error self-correction method is presented to further improve the ranging accuracy. Finally, we carry out simulations and experiments to show that the presented algorithm in this paper significantly improves the relative position and orientation precision of both the pure UWB localization system and the fusion system integrated with dead reckoning.

The collision warning system (CWS) plays an essential role in vehicle active safety. However, traditional distance-measuring solutions, e.g., millimeter-wave radars, ultrasonic radars, and lidars, fail to reflect vehicles’ relative attitude and motion trends. In this paper, we proposed a vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) cooperative collision warning system (CCWS) consisting of an ultra-wideband (UWB) relative positioning/directing module and a dead reckoning (DR) module with wheel-speed sensors. Each vehicle has four UWB modules on the body corners and two wheel-speed sensors on the rear wheels in the presented configuration. An over-constrained localization method is proposed to calculate the relative position and orientation with the UWB data more accurately. Vehicle velocities and yaw rates are measured by wheel-speed sensors. An extended Kalman filter (EKF) is applied based on the relative kinematic model to combine the UWB and DR data. Finally, the time to collision (TTC) is estimated based on the predicted vehicle collision position. Furthermore, through UWB signals, vehicles can simultaneously communicate with each other and share information, e.g., velocity, yaw rate, which brings the potential for enhanced real-time performance. Simulation and experimental results show that the proposed method significantly improves the positioning, directing, and velocity estimating accuracy, and the proposed system can efficiently provide collision warning.