Vehicle slip angle (VSA) estimation is of paramount importance for connected automated vehicle dynamic control, especially in critical lateral driving scenarios. In this paper, a novel kinematic-model-based VSA estimation method is proposed by fusing information from a global navigation satellite system (GNSS) and an inertial measurement unit (IMU). First, to reject the gravity components induced by the vehicle roll and pitch, a vehicle attitude angle observer based on the square-root cubature Kalman filter (SCKF) is designed to estimate the roll and pitch. A novel feedback mechanism based on the vehicle intrinsic information (the steering angle and wheel speed) for the pitch and roll is designed. Then, the integration of the reverse smoothing and grey prediction is adopted to compensate for the cumulative velocity errors during the relatively low sampling interval of the GNSS. Moreover, the GNSS signal delay has been addressed by an estimation-prediction integrated framework. Finally, the results confirm that the proposed method can estimate the VSA under both the slalom and double lane change (DLC) scenarios.

Automated Vehicle Sideslip Angle Estimation Considering Signal Measurement Characteristic

In this paper, we investigate the application of Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication to improve the perception performance of autonomous vehicles. We present a robust cooperative perception framework with V2X communication using a novel vision Transformer. Specifically, we build a holistic attention model, namely V2X-ViT, to effectively fuse information across on-road agents (i.e., vehicles and infrastructure). V2X-ViT consists of alternating layers of heterogeneous multi-agent self-attention and multi-scale window self-attention, which captures inter-agent interaction and per-agent spatial relationships. These key modules are designed in a unified Transformer architecture to handle common V2X challenges, including asynchronous information sharing, pose errors, and heterogeneity of V2X components. To validate our approach, we create a large-scale V2X perception dataset using CARLA and OpenCDA. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that V2X-ViT sets new state-of-the-art performance for 3D object detection and achieves robust performance even under harsh, noisy environments. The code is available at https://github.com/DerrickXuNu/v2x-vit.

V2X-ViT: Vehicle-to-Everything Cooperative Perception with Vision Transformer

The sideslip angle and attitude are crucial for automated driving especially for chassis integrated control and environmental perception. In this article an inertial measurement unit (IMU)-based automated vehicle body sideslip angle and attitude estimation method aided by low-sample-rate global navigation satellite system (GNSS) velocity and position measurements using parallel adaptive Kalman filters is proposed. This method can estimate the sideslip angle and attitude simultaneously and is robust against the vehicle parameters and road friction even as the vehicle enters critical maneuvers. First, based on the acceleration and angular rate from the six-dimensional inertial measurement unit, the attitude, velocity and position (AVP) are integrated with the navigation coordinates and the AVP error dynamics and observation equations of the integration results are developed. Second, parallel innovation adaptive estimation (IAE)-based Kalman filters is designed to estimate the AVP error of the integration method to address the issues of the GNSS low sampled rate and abnormal measurements. Then the AVP error is forwarded to the AVP integration to compensate the accumulated error. To improve the heading angle estimation accuracy, the heading error is estimated by a decoupled IAE-based Kalman filter aided by GNSS heading. In addition, time synchronization of the IMU and GNSS is realized through hardware based on the pulse per second signal of the GNSS receiver and the spatial synchronization is achieved by a direct compensation method. Lastly, the sideslip angle and attitude estimation method is validated by a comprehensive experimental test including critical double lane change and slalom maneuvers. The results show that the estimation error of the longitudinal velocity and lateral velocity is smaller than 0.1 m/s $({1\sigma })$ , and the estimation error of the sideslip angle is smaller than 0.15° $({1\sigma })$ .

IMU-Based Automated Vehicle Body Sideslip Angle and Attitude Estimation Aided by GNSS Using Parallel Adaptive Kalman Filters

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with lightweight sensors, such as RGB cameras and LiDAR, have significant potential in precision agriculture, including object detection. Tassel detection in maize is an essential trait given its relevance as the beginning of the reproductive stage of growth and development of the plants. However, compared with general object detection, tassel detection based on RGB imagery acquired by UAVs is more challenging due to the small size, time-dependent variable shape, and complexity of the objects of interest. A novel algorithm referred to as YOLOv5-tassel is proposed to detect tassels in UAV-based RGB imagery. A bidirectional feature pyramid network is adopted for the path-aggregation neck to effectively fuse cross-scale features. The robust attention module of SimAM is introduced to extract the features of interest before each detection head. An additional detection head is also introduced to improve small-size tassel detection based on the original YOLOv5. Annotation is performed with guidance from center points derived from CenterNet to improve the selection of the bounding boxes for tassels. Finally, to address the issue of limited reference data, transfer learning based on the VisDrone dataset is adopted. Testing results for our proposed YOLOv5-tassel method achieved the mAP value of 44.7%, which is better than well-known object detection approaches, such as FCOS, RetinaNet, and YOLOv5.

YOLOv5-Tassel: Detecting Tassels in RGB UAV Imagery With Improved YOLOv5 Based on Transfer Learning

An autonomous vehicle sideslip angle estimation algorithm is proposed based on consensus and vehicle kinematics/ dynamics synthesis. Based on the velocity error measurements between the reduced Inertial Navigation System (R-INS) and the global navigation satellite system (GNSS), a velocity-based Kalman filter is formalized to estimate the velocity errors, attitude errors, and gyro bias errors of the R-INS. The observability issue of the heading error, which affects sideslip estimation, is analyzed. Then, to enhance the observability and improve the estimation accuracy of the heading error under normal driving conditions, a consensus Kalman information filter is developed to synthesize the vehicle kinematics and dynamics and estimate the heading error. Within the developed consensus framework, one node augments a novel heading error measurement from a linear vehicle-dynamic-based sideslip estimator and another node adopts the heading error from the GNSS course. Next, based on the vehicle lateral excitation level, a weighting scheme is proposed to fuse the error state estimates from the velocity-based and consensus Kalman state observers. The stability of the proposed state observers is also investigated. Comprehensive experimental studies, including critical slalom, slight/normal double lane change, and normal driving maneuvers, were conducted to verify the proposed estimation framework; they confirm the reliability and accuracy of the estimator in various automated driving conditions even in comparison with state-of-the-art methods that utilize more measurements (dual-antenna GNSS). Also, this novel multisensor framework is extendable to leverage speed information from other sensors such as cameras and light detection and ranging (LiDAR) to increase reliability and accuracy.

Autonomous Vehicle Kinematics and Dynamics Synthesis for Sideslip Angle Estimation Based on Consensus Kalman Filter

The vehicle sideslip angle is an important state for vehicle dynamic control, which needs to be estimated as it could not be obtained directly by the vehicle. To improve the estimation accuracy of the sideslip angle based on the intelligent vehicle platform, this study proposes a novel vehicle sideslip angle estimation algorithm with the fusion of dynamic model and vision information. Firstly, to further improve the model accuracy of the vehicle during lateral acceleration conditions, a vehicle dynamic model is established considering the acceleration error compensation with the assistance of attitude information. In addition, based on the lane line information obtained from the equipped camera in intelligent vehicles, a visual geometric model is established. Owing to the measurement delay and low sampling frequency of the camera, a multi-rate sideslip angle observer with delay compensation is designed to coordinate with the inter-frequency signal of the vehicle chassis. Finally, the effectiveness of the algorithm is verified by the slalom test.

https://ietresearch.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1049/iet-its.2019.0826

Vision-aided intelligent vehicle sideslip angle estimation based on a dynamic model

Vehicle localization is essential for intelligent and autonomous vehicles. To improve the accuracy of vehicle stand-alone localization in highly dynamic driving conditions during GNSS (Global Navigation Satellites Systems) outages, this paper proposes a vehicle localization system based on vehicle chassis sensors considering vehicle lateral velocity. Firstly, a GNSS/On-board sensors fusion localization framework is established, which could estimate vehicle states such as attitude, velocity, and position. Secondly, when the vehicle has a large lateral motion, nonholonomic constraint in the lateral direction loses fidelity. Instead of using nonholonomic constraint, we propose a vehicle dynamics/kinematics fusion lateral velocity estimation algorithm, which combines the advantage of vehicle dynamic model in low dynamic driving conditions and the advantage of kinematic model in highly dynamic driving conditions. Thirdly, vehicle longitudinal velocity estimated by WSS (Wheel Speed Sensor) and lateral velocity estimated by proposed method are as measurements for the localization system. All information is fused by an adaptive Kalman filter. Finally, vehicle experiments in U-turn maneuver and left-turn maneuver at a traffic intersection are conducted to verify the proposed method. Four different methods are compared in the experiments, and the results show that the estimated position accuracy of our method is below half a meter during a 5s GNSS outage and could keep a sub-meter-level during a 20s GNSS outage while the vehicle has a relatively large lateral motion.

Xin Xia

Papers

Automated Vehicle Sideslip Angle Estimation Considering Signal Measurement Characteristic

IMU-Based Automated Vehicle Body Sideslip Angle and Attitude Estimation Aided by GNSS Using Parallel Adaptive Kalman Filters

Autonomous Vehicle Kinematics and Dynamics Synthesis for Sideslip Angle Estimation Based on Consensus Kalman Filter

Vision-aided intelligent vehicle sideslip angle estimation based on a dynamic model

Improved Vehicle Localization Using On-Board Sensors and Vehicle Lateral Velocity