A real-time, multi-sensor architecture for fusion of delayed observations: application to vehicle localisation

This paper presents a software framework called AROCCAM that was developed to design and implement data fusion applications. This architecture permits not only to build applications in a very short time unburdening the user of sensor communication. Moreover, it manages unsynchronized sensors and delayed observations in an elegant manner that permits to the user to fuse those information easily, taking into account the environment perception date. At first, we describe the reasons of the delaying of sensor observations and discuss the fusion problem of unsynchronized sensor data. Then the features of AROCCAM that make it possible to fuse such data are explained. Finally, we present a typical automative application involving our system: real-time vehicle localisation.