On-bicycle vehicle tracking at traffic intersections using inexpensive low-density lidar

This paper explores the challenges in developing an inexpensive on-bicycle sensing system to track vehicles at a traffic intersection. In particular, opposing traffic with vehicles that can travel straight or turn left are considered. The estimated vehicle trajectories can be used for collision prevention between bicycles and left-turning vehicles. A compact solid-state 2-D low-density Lidar is mounted at the front of a bicycle to obtain distance measurements from vehicles. Vehicle tracking can be achieved by clustering based approaches for assigning measurement points to individual vehicles, introducing a correction term for position measurement refinement, and by exploiting data association and interacting multiple model Kalman filtering approaches for multi-target tracking. The tracking performance of the developed system is evaluated by both simulation and experimental results. Two types of scenarios that involve straight driving and left turning vehicles are considered. Experimental results show that the developed system can successfully track cars in these scenarios accurately in spite of the low measurement density of the sensor.