Robust Localization for Autonomous Vehicles in Highway Scenes

TL;DR

This paper presents a robust highway localization system for autonomous vehicles, combining LiDAR, control algorithms, and a new dataset, outperforming existing urban-focused methods in highway scenarios.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel highway-specific localization system, a dual-likelihood LiDAR approach, and releases a challenging highway dataset for benchmarking.

Findings

System performs similarly to urban methods on city roads.

Shows superior robustness in highway scenarios.

Validated over one million kilometers of road testing.

Abstract

Localization for autonomous vehicles on highways remains under-explored compared to urban roads, and state-of-the-art methods for urban scenes degrade when directly applied to highways. We identify key challenges including environment changes under information homogeneity, heavy occlusion, degraded GNSS signals, and stringent downstream requirements on accuracy and latency. We propose a robust localization system to address highway challenges, which uses a dual-likelihood LiDAR front end that decouples 3D geometric structures and 2D road-texture cues to handle environment changes; a Control-EKF further leverages steering and acceleration commands to reduce lag and improve closed-loop behavior. An automated offline mapping and ground-truth pipeline keep maps fresh at high cadence for optimal localization performance. To catalyze progress, we release a public dataset covering both urban roads and highways while focusing on representative challenging highway clips, totaling 163 km; benchmarking is standardized using product-oriented accuracy metrics and certified ground truth. Compared to Apollo and Autoware, our system performs similarly on urban roads but shows superior robustness on challenging highway scenarios. The system has been validated by more than one million kilometers of road testing.