Environment and Tools for the Development of Navigation- and Map-based Driver Assistance and Vehicle Guidance Systems

The use of navigation and map data allows the realization of sophisticated functionality within a mobile control system, for example, as part of a driver assistance or vehicle guidance system. At the same time, handling it in real-time as part of a controller structure can become very complex and therefore challenging. The present thesis focuses on the creation and the use of a development environment that enables the implementation of such systems. The works aim at supporting a model-based development workflow and at providing a lean and compact foundation for navigation- and map-based control systems that, with reasonable efforts, can be transferred to different vehicles, different control hardware and different applications. Thereby, the intention is not only to provide a set of working and reusable software elements, but also a methodology describing how these elements can efficiently be tested, combined and implemented.A test platform in the form of a reduced-scale model vehicle is presented that serves as a demonstrator throughout the works described. With its simplified, car-like kinematics and the set of sensors and actuators it is equipped with, the vehicle's appearance is essentially reduced to the abstraction level of the dynamic models upon which the underlying software is built. It is suggested that control software developed and tested on the vehicle is generic enough to be, in principle, transferable to full-scale vehicles. Basic models of the vehicle dynamics, which are compatible to the ones commonly used in the area of vehicle dynamics, are provided. Furthermore, a Rapid Control Prototyping (RCP) workflow is proposed that makes use of various offline and online in-the-loop simulation methods to efficiently develop and test applications making use of the vehicle's sensing and actuation capabilities.Essential demands on GNSS-based control systems are introduced and a navigation filter implementation is presented. As a central element, a flexible Electronic Horizon (EH) provider is developed that allows the incorporation of data from digital road maps into real-time control systems. A versatile controller for lateral vehicle motion is developed and implemented in such a form that it can be suitably combined with the navigation filter and the real-time map data supplied by the EH provider. Thereby, the elements navigation filter, EH provider and lateral controller form a powerful set of tools that allow for realization of a number of interesting applications, both in an automotive and in a more general context. In order to prove the versatility of the proposed tools, various application examples are presented that have been enabled by them. These Applications are an Adaptive Front Lighting (AFL) system, an Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) system as well as a Virtual Track, Vehicle Platoon and a Heterogeneous Rendezvous application