Integrity Monitoring of Multimodal Perception System for Vehicle Localization

Autonomous driving systems tightly rely on the quality of the data from sensors for tasks such as localization and navigation. In this work, we present an integrity monitoring framework that can assess the quality of multimodal data from exteroceptive sensors. The proposed multisource coherence-based integrity assessment framework is capable of handling highway as well as complex semi-urban and urban scenarios. To achieve such generalization and scalability, we employ a semantic-grid data representation, which can efficiently represent the surroundings of the vehicle. The proposed method is used to evaluate the integrity of sources in several scenarios, and the integrity markers generated are used for identifying and quantifying unreliable data. A particular focus is given to real-world complex scenarios obtained from publicly available datasets where integrity localization requirements are of high importance. Those scenarios are examined to evaluate the performance of the framework and to provide proof-of-concept. We also establish the importance of the proposed integrity assessment framework in context-based localization applications for autonomous vehicles. The proposed method applies the integrity assessment concepts in the field of aviation to ground vehicles and provides the Protection Level markers (Horizontal, Lateral, Longitudinal) for perception systems used for vehicle localization.