General Electric Company

Peter J Reeve

Malcolm T Roberts

Michael P Robins

An automated vehicle includes a navigation system which carries out a dead reckoning calculation of the vehicle's position based on inputs from sensors on the motion of a steering wheel in the preceding time interval, .DELTA.t. Parameters of the system including the heading angle, the spatial position x,y the angular drift in the steering angle .alpha., a crabbing angle .beta. and a variation 1.sub.dm in steering wheel radius are updated by the addition of the product of a Kalman gain calculated by computer and an error signal produced each time an observation is made by laser bearing finding equipment on the vehicle.

Automated vehicle drift correction

A vehicle control and guidance system in which a desired route for the vehicle is stored in the vehicle in the form of co-ordinates in a ground reference frame. The `vectors` between these junction points are divided by successive reference points into incremental vectors, the reference points being generated ahead of the vehicle at regular intervals. A dead reckoning system predicts the position of the vehicle at the end of each interval and this estimate is corrected, using a Kalman filter, by an independent fixed-target detection system using a scanning laser. The error between the estimated vehicle position and the local incremental vector provides a steering angle correction for the vehicle and the vehicle speed is dependent upon the lag of the vehicle behind the generation of reference points.

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Warwickshire, United Kingdom

Peter J Reeve