Enhanced Inter-Vehicular relative positioning

Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) applications for integral and cooperative vehicle safety as well as some Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADASs) benefit from precise determination of relative positions between dynamic traffic objects. With conventional Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) measurements, e.g. using Global Positioning System (GPS), the required accuracy cannot be achieved. For this reason, an exchange of GNSS observations via Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network (VANET) is proposed in this paper. In particular, the European Inter-Vehicle Communication (IVC) protocol stack ITS-G5 is employed. With these exchanged GNSS observations, Differential GNSS (DGNSS) or Real-Time Kinematic (RTK) calculations provide a precise relative position vector. However, due to relative movement of traffic objects, this position vector becomes obsolete for increasing transmission delays. For this reason, a mitigating kinematic model is set up and validated experimentally. With respect to fixed RTK solutions, this kinematic model reduces the errors by an average of 61% compared to position calculations ignoring IVC latency.