A Novel Map Representation for Automatic Construction of Topological Map and Lane-Level Route Planning

Traditional road-level topological maps cannot meet the demand for high precision navigation services required by human drivers and autonomous vehicles. Meanwhile, current enhanced lane-level topological maps with redundant details pose practical challenges for automatic map construction and efficient lane-level route planning. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel topological map representation. Based on this representation, a hierarchical mapping framework is established, which includes the extraction of road primitives, generation of directed graph, and automatic construction of lane-level topological map. The constructed topological map enables efficient lane-level route planning by the shortest path search algorithm with having the minimal nodes of topological graph. The proposed mapping framework and lane-level route planning have been extensively tested and evaluated on two real urban traffic scenarios, demonstrating the feasibility and effectiveness of this novel topological map representation.