FlexMap Fusion: Georeferencing and Automated Conflation of HD Maps with OpenStreetMap

Today’s software stacks for autonomous vehicles rely on HD maps to enable sufficient localization, accurate path planning, and reliable motion prediction. Recent developments have resulted in pipelines for the automated generation of HD maps to reduce manual efforts for creating and updating these HD maps. We present FlexMap Fusion, a methodology to automatically update and enhance existing HD vector maps using OpenStreetMap. Our approach is designed to enable the use of HD maps created from LiDAR and camera data within Autoware. The pipeline provides different functionalities: It provides the possibility to georeference both the point cloud map and the vector map using an RTK-corrected GNSS signal. Moreover, missing semantic attributes can be conflated from OpenStreetMap into the vector map. Differences between the HD map and OpenStreetMap are visualized for manual refinement by the user. In general, our findings indicate that our approach leads to reduced human labor during HD map generation, increases the scalability of the mapping pipeline, and improves the completeness and usability of the maps. The methodological choices may have resulted in limitations that arise especially at complex street structures, e.g., traffic islands. Therefore, more research is necessary to create efficient preprocessing algorithms and advancements in the dynamic adjustment of matching parameters. In order to build upon our work, our source code is available at https://github.com/TUMFTM/FlexMap_Fusion.