Methods and systems for vehicle environment map generation and updating

Abstract

A method and a system for dynamically generating and updating a global tridimensional map of an environment surrounding one or several moving vehicles on which N tridimensional sensors are mounted and communicates with a central processing unit. Each sensor generates a continuous stream of point cloud frames, in parallel and asynchronously with the other sensors, the point cloud frames are representative of object surfaces located in a local volume of the environment surrounding each sensor. The central processing unit continuously receives the continuous streams from the sensors, store them in a memory and, for each newly received point cloud frame of each stream, generates or updates a global cumulated tridimensional map of the environment of the at least one vehicle by determining an aligned point cloud frame in a global coordinate system of the environment, and updating the global cumulated tridimensional map by merging the aligned point cloud frame.