Vehicular navigation and route guidance are prominent among advanced technologies under development for the relief of traffic congestion. Future vehicles equipped with dynamic route guidance systems will keep track of vehicle location, and visual displays and/or synthesized voice will automatically direct the driver over optimal routes taking into account real-time traffic conditions. Vehicular navigation systems use various combinations of dead-reckoning, proximity-beacon, radio location, digital map, and mobile data communication technologies. The most widely used approaches include dead reckoning with artificial-intelligence map matching. Differential odometry, developed almost 2000 years ago by the ancient Chinese for use in the "south-pointing chariot", the world's first vehicular navigation system, is often used for dead-reckoning. This paper describes vehicular navigation systems approaches, including major programs for their development and deployment, and discusses the important issues to be resolved.
Abstract