DEVICE AND METHOD FOR CALCULATING A POSITION OF A VEHICLE

Provided is a self-position calculating apparatus capable of accurately detecting a patterned light beam projected onto a road surface, and capable of accurately calculating the self-position of a vehicle. The self-position calculating apparatus includes: a light projector (11) configured to project the patterned light beam onto the road surface around a vehicle; an image capturing unit (12) configured to capture an image of an area onto which the patterned light beam is projected; a patterned light beam extractor (21) configured to extract a position of the patterned light beam from the image; an orientation angle calculator (22) configured to calculate an orientation angle of the vehicle relative to the road surface from the position of the patterned light beam; an orientation change amount calculator (24) configured to calculate an amount of change in orientation of the vehicle based on temporal changes in multiple feature points on the road surface on the image; and a self-position calculator (26) configured to calculate a current position and a current orientation angle of the vehicle by adding the amount of change in the orientation to an initial position and an initial orientation angle of the vehicle. If a detected condition of the patterned light beam is equal to or greater than a threshold value, the patterned light beam extractor (21) extracts the position of the patterned light beam from a superimposed image by superimposing images in frames obtained with the image capturing unit (12).