Advanced vehicle navigation applied in the BMW real time light simulation

Advanced vehicle navigation based on the US Global Positioning Systems (GPS ) will play a major role in future vehicle control systems. Contemporary ve hicle navigation systems generally consist of vehicle positioning using sat ellites and location and orientation of the vehicle with respect to the roa dway geometry using a digitised map on a CD-ROM. The standard GPS (with Sel ective Availability) enables positioning with an accuracy of at least 100 m and is sufficiently accurate for most route guidance tasks. More accurate, precision navigation can be obtained by Differential GPS techniques. A new light concept called Adaptive Light Control (ALC) has been developed with the aim to improve night-time traffic safety. ALC improves the headlamp ill umination by means of continuous adaptation of the headlamps according to t he current driving situation and current environment. In order to ensure ra pid prototyping and early testing, the step from offline to online (real-ti me) simulation of light distributions has been successfully completed in th e driving simulator. The solutions are directly ported to real vehicles to allow further testing with natural road conditions.