Vehicle pose estimation algorithm for parking automated guided vehicle

Parking automated guided vehicle is more and more widely used for efficient automatic parking and one of the tough challenges for parking automated guided vehicle is the problem of vehicle pose estimation. The traditional algorithms rely on the profile information of vehicle body and sensors are required to be mounted at the top of the vehicle. However, the sensors are always mounted at a lower place because the height of a parking automated guided vehicle is always beyond 0.2mm, where we can only get the vehicle wheel information and limited vehicle body information. In this article, a novel method is given based on the symmetry of wheel point clouds collected by 3-D lidar. Firstly, we combine cell-based method with support vector machine classifier to segment ground point clouds. Secondly, wheel point clouds are segmented from obstacle point clouds and their symmetry are corrected by iterative closest point algorithm. Then, we estimate the vehicle pose by the symmetry plane of wheel point clouds. Finally, we compare our method with registration method that combines sample consensus initial alignment algorithm and iterative closest point algorithm. The experiments have been carried out.