A Design Architecture for Sensor Data Fusion Systems with Application to Automotive Safety

In this paper we present a modular sensor data fusion functional architecture, tailored for development of automotive active safety systems. The purpose of the fusion system is to provide active safety applications with accurate knowledge regarding the environment surrounding the vehicle. Our proposed functional architecture is designed in such way that the fusion system is easy to maintain, upgrade and re-use. These aspects are assessed by the use of a reference implementation which is evaluated in terms of tracking performance and scalability. Furthermore, the reference implementation demonstrates that a system can be implemented using rapid prototyping tools, from which we can automatically generate c-code.