Data processing: vehicles – navigation – and relative location – Vehicle control – guidance – operation – or indication – Automatic route guidance vehicle
Reexamination Certificate
1999-07-08
2001-08-07
Nguyen, Tan (Department: 3661)
Data processing: vehicles, navigation, and relative location
Vehicle control, guidance, operation, or indication
Automatic route guidance vehicle
C701S026000, C701S214000, C342S357490
Reexamination Certificate
active
06272405
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus and method for guiding an autonomous traveling vehicle which travels identifying its own positions based on positioning information sent from satellites.
2. Prior Art
Recently, autonomously traveling and working vehicles doing programmed works unmannedly have been put into practical use in various fields. Typical examples of such vehicles are lawn mowing vehicles used in golf courses, sports grounds, parks and other outdoor fields, cultivators, vehicles for dusting agricultural chemicals or fertilizer and vehicles for doing civil engineering works.
These autonomously traveling and working vehicles (hereinafter, referred to just autonomous vehicles) are autonomously operated using two techniques, one is a Global Positioning System (GPS) and the other is a dead reckoning navigation method. GPS is a technique for finding a vehicle position by radio waives received from positioning satellites and the dead reckoning navigation method is a technique for determining a current vehicle position based on a running direction detected by an earth magnetism sensor and a traveling distance detected by a wheel encoder.
However, GPS has positioning errors caused by the time difference between satellites and the radio receiver, orbital errors, delay of radio wave in ionized layer or in atmosphere, multipass and the like. Generally, it is said that GPS has positioning errors of several tens meters and even D-GPS having a higher positioning accuracy than GPS has errors of several centimeters to several meters.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
It is an object of the present invention to provide an apparatus for guiding a vehicle with high accuracy by finding a correct position of the vehicle.
To achieve the objects, the present invention comprises a means for storing a reference position data of a reference point whose accurate position is known, a means for obtaining a position data of the vehicle when the vehicle is located on the reference point, a means for obtaining a correction data based on the reference position data and the position data, and a means for correcting a current position of the vehicle by using the correction data to obtain a real position of the vehicle.
REFERENCES:
patent: 5394333 (1995-02-01), Kao
patent: 5729457 (1998-03-01), Seymour
patent: 5938704 (1999-08-01), Torii
patent: 6064942 (2000-05-01), Johnson et al.
patent: 6070673 (2000-06-01), Wendte
Fuji Jukogyo Kabushiki Kaisha
Nguyen Tan
Smith , Gambrell & Russell, LLP
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