Low-cost curb detection and localization system using multiple ultrasonic sensors

Curb detection and localization systems constitute an important aspect of environmental recognition systems of autonomous driving vehicles. This is because detecting curbs can provide information about the boundary of a road, which can be used as a safety system to prevent unexpected intrusions into pedestrian walkways. Moreover, curb detection and localization systems enable the autonomous vehicle to recognize the surrounding environment and the lane in which the vehicle is driving. Most existing curb detection and localization systems use multichannel light detection and ranging (lidar) as a primary sensor. However, although lidar demonstrates high performance, it is too expensive to be used for commercial vehicles. In this paper, we use ultrasonic sensors to implement a practical, low-cost curb detection and localization system. To compensate for the relatively lower performance of ultrasonic sensors as compared to other higher-cost sensors, we used multiple ultrasonic sensors and applied a series of novel processing algorithms that overcome the limitations of a single ultrasonic sensor and conventional algorithms. The proposed algorithms consisted of a ground reflection elimination filter, a measurement reliability calculation, and distance estimation algorithms corresponding to the reliability of the obtained measurements. The performance of the proposed processing algorithms was demonstrated by a field test under four representative curb scenarios. The availability of reliable distance estimates from the proposed methods with three ultrasonic sensors was significantly higher than that from the other methods, e.g., 92.08% vs. 66.34%, when the test vehicle passed a trapezoidal-shaped road shoulder. When four ultrasonic sensors were used, 96.04% availability and 13.50 cm accuracy (root mean square error) were achieved.