A System for Measuring Current Position and/or Heading of Vehicles

Abstract

This paper proposes a measuring system for determining the current position and/or heading of a ground vehicle. The system is made up of digital speed pick-ups (tire revolution counters) set on both sides of the vehicle, a self-contained computing processor and an X-Y recorder. The self-contained processor computes the location and heading of the vehicle using only the speed data of both sides of the vehicle and also presents the location data on the X-Y recorder within very short period. The experimental vehicle is a tri-cycle battery car with rubber tires. Reduction of induced errors has been performed by measuring the centrifugal acceleration of a turning vehicle and sensing the azimuth reference line drawn on the road. The trajectory of the vehice has been successfully displayed by the experimental system implemented. The system can be applied to determining the position and heading for automatic vehicle monitoring and automatic guidance of ground vehicles.