Development of a Lateral Control System for Autonomous Vehicles Using Data Fusion of Vision and IMU Sensors with Field Tests

In this paper, a novel lateral control system is proposed for the purpose of improving lane keeping performance which is independent from GPS signals. Lane keeping is a key function for the realization of unmanned driving systems. In order to obtain this objective, a vision sensor based real-time lane detection scheme is developed. Furthermore, we employ a data fusion along with a real-time steering angle of the test vehicle to improve its lane keeping performance. The fused direction data can be obtained by an IMU sensor and vision sensor. The performance of the proposed system was verified by computer simulations along with field tests using MOHAVE, a commercial vehicle from Kia Motors of Korea.