Roadside Positioning Infrastructure for Automated Driving: Experimental Studies on a Racetrack and in Highway Tunnels

Accurate and reliable vehicle positioning is a prerequisite for the development of cooperative intelligent transportation systems (C-ITSs), especially for automated driving applications and in scenarios where global navigation satellite systems (GNSSs) fail to meet the requirements of safety-critical services. This article presents an experimental assessment of a roadside infrastructure-based localization system that exploits a wideband wireless technology to estimate a vehicle’s position and communicates this information in real time to the vehicle via a vehicle-to-everything (V2X) link. We highlight the need to use advanced tracking methods to cope with heterogeneous vehicle dynamics. We validate the proposed system experimentally in both racetrack and highway tunnel scenarios using an ultra wideband (UWB) positioning network, showcasing the system’s feasibility through on-field implementations. The findings reveal that the wideband radio technology obtains positioning accuracy comparable to GNSS real-time kinematic with a mismatch lower than 30 cm in 95% of the cases. This capability provides a seamless high-accuracy positioning service and successfully unlocks autonomous navigation in tunnels. This article underscores the key role of the roadside infrastructure in enhancing autonomous vehicle navigation by integrating a precise positioning technology as UWB with V2X communication, thereby meeting the stringent requirements of safety-critical C-ITS applications.