Cooperative Driving based on Inter-vehicle Communications: Experimental Platform and Algorithm

This paper describes our efforts in building an experimental platform to conduct research on cooperative driving in intelligent transportation systems (ITS). A miniature vehicle is developed based on the COTS-BOTS robot and an overhead vision system is used to localize the vehicles. The single lane tracking control algorithm is described first. To control multiple vehicles to drive through an intersection without collision, a distributed cooperative driving algorithm is developed, which is based on velocity planning using search algorithms in the corresponding coordination diagram. Experimental results verify our proposed approach and we believe this platform can serve as a cost-effective testbed to study vehicle-to-vehicle communication based cooperative driving in intelligent transportation systems