Passive Guidance for Offroad-Vehicles

In contrast to commercial automated driving, where systems are usually able to use infrastructure such as high-definition maps and GNSS as well as active sensors such as Lidar or Radar, in unstructured offroad environments for military or disaster response application such means are not available. In order to address a logistics tasks in such a setting we propose a vehicle guidance approach that is based on IMU pose tracking and visual image retrieval in an image database build up from a training trajectory. The approach has been implemented as a prototype and evaluated with IMU and image data recorded in several recording campaigns in military offroad areas.