Patent ID: 9721170
Date: 2017-08-01
CPC Classifications: G01C,G06K,G06T

Claim:
1. A self-location calculating device comprising: a light projector configured to project a patterned light onto a road surface around a vehicle; an image capturing unit installed in the vehicle, and configured to capture and obtain an image of the road surface around the vehicle including an area onto which the patterned light is projected; an attitude angle calculation unit configured to calculate an attitude angle of the vehicle relative to the road surface from a position of the patterned light on the image obtained by the image capturing unit; an attitude change amount calculation unit configured to calculate an amount of change in the attitude of the vehicle based on temporal changes in a plurality of feature points on the road surface on the image obtained by the image capturing unit; a self-location calculation unit configured to calculate a current position and a current attitude angle of the vehicle by adding the amount of change in the attitude to an initial position and the attitude angle of the vehicle; and a road surface condition determination unit configured to determine whether or not a condition of the road surface around the vehicle changes as much as or more than a threshold value by detecting a change in the condition of the road surface, wherein when the road surface condition determination unit determines that the condition of the road surface changes as much as or more than the threshold value, the self-location calculation unit calculates the current position and the current attitude angle of the vehicle by adding the amount of change in the attitude to the current position and the current attitude angle of the vehicle which are calculated in a previous information process cycle.