Run-Level Evaluation of a Confidence-Gated Kalman Lane-Keeping Architecture for a 1:10-Scale Autonomous Vehicle

Lane keeping under degraded visual confidence remains challenging because most existing approaches focus either on improving lane-feature extraction or on estimating vehicle motion, while giving less attention to how unreliable visual measurements should modify the estimator–controller interaction in a physical closed-loop system. This paper presents a confidence-gated Kalman lane-keeping architecture for a 1:10-scale autonomous vehicle. The methodological contribution lies in the direct coupling of visual confidence, state estimation, and steering control: unreliable lane measurements are down-weighted through confidence-dependent measurement noise, while the propagated lane-relative state remains available to the controller. The primary experimental unit is the run, defined as one logged lap under one control configuration; frame-level summaries are retained only as historical reproducibility material. In the run-level comparison, the autonomous vision, inertial measurement unit (IMU)-feedforward, and Kalman filter (KF) group KF_G1—the first inferential KF generation—had lower mean absolute error than the human baseline, while vision and KF_G1 had overlapping run-level confidence intervals for absolute error. KF_G1 shifted the mean signed bias closer to the lane reference than the vision and IMU groups, but with higher run-level spread than vision. KF_G2, the second observational KF generation, is reported only as an observational generation comparison, so no causal claim is made for its estimator–controller correction weight Ks=0.15 setting. KF_G3, the single descriptive adverse-condition KF run, is reported without an estimable confidence interval or population-level adverse-illumination inference. A further limitation is that the inertial prediction pathway was inactive in the logged Kalman-filter runs because the inertial coupling coefficient α=0. The main contribution is a reproducible run-level evaluation of confidence-gated estimator–controller coupling that distinguishes supported evidence from observational and descriptive cases.