Driver's associate: a system for vehicle navigation and driving assistance
OwnerJoe Bolgerinventor
Life of this patent
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Abstract
The Driver's Associate assists a driver of a vehicle to more efficiently reach a desired destination, to record the route driven, and to provide driving summary reports. The present invention uses a unique method for tracking the dead-reckoned coordinate of the vehicle by using a sum-of-squares or .chi..sup.2 minimization algorithm for plotting the navigation route, tracking the vehicle through the road map database, and for normalizing the vehicle's location between the dead-reckoned coordinate and the roadway projected coordinate. The present invention also uses a Singular Value Decomposition method for optimizing the normalization process so that we can track a vehicle's location more accurately than other navigation devices.
Claims8
An apparatus for vehicle navigation and driving assistance, comprising:
- a computer;
- a road map database stored in said computer;
- means for acquiring a vehicle's distance traveled and compass heading;
- means for calculating dead-reckoned coordinates from said vehicle's distance traveled and compass heading;
- means for acquiring roadway projected coordinates from said road map database;
- means for determining a probable navigation route for acquiring the next roadway projected coordinates from said map database;
- means for normalizing said dead-reckoned coordinates to said roadway projected coordinates;
- and
- means for displaying said normalized coordinates on a visual representation of a portion of said road map database to assist the user in determining said vehicle's current location.
An apparatus for vehicle navigation and driving assistance, comprising:
- a computer;
- a road map database stored on said computer;
- means for acquiring a vehicle's distance traveled and compass heading;
- means for calculating the dead-reckoned coordinates from said vehicle's distance traveled and compass heading using the following equations:
- ##EQU11## where C is the distance traveled of the vehicle, and
- .THETA. is the vehicle's compass heading;
- means for acquiring the roadway projected coordinates from said road map database;
- means for determining a probable navigation route for acquiring the next roadway projected coordinates from said map database using a sum-of-squares minimization according to the following equation:
- ##EQU12## where (x.sub.i ', y.sub.i ') are the dead-reckoned coordinates of the i.sup.th measurement,
- (x.sub.i ', y.sub.i ') are the roadway projected coordinates of the i.sup.th measurement,
- .THETA..sub.i is the heading from the i.sup.th measurement,
- .THETA..sub.i is the heading of the roadway at the location (x.sub.i ', y.sub.i '),
- .sigma..sub.x and .sigma..sub.y are the statistical standard deviations of the dead-reckoned coordinate measurements, and
- .sigma..sub..THETA. is statistical standard deviation measuring the compass heading;
- means for normalizing said dead-reckoned coordinates to said roadway projected coordinates for straight paths according to:
- ##EQU13## where (U,V) are the coordinate adjustment offsets, or normalizing said dead-reckoned coordinates to said roadway projected coordinates for curved paths according to:
- ##EQU14## where d and q are the adjustment factors, and
- F.sub.i is the following function:
- ##EQU15## ;
- and, means for displaying said normalized coordinates on a visual representation of said roadway to assist in determining said vehicle's current location.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.