Title :
Coordinated Maneuvering of Automated Vehicles in Platoons
Author :
Michaud, François ; Lepage, Pierre ; Frenette, Patrick ; Létourneau, Dominic ; Gaubert, Nicolas
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Electr. Eng. & Comput. Eng., Sherbrooke, Que.
Abstract :
To eventually have automated vehicles operate in platoons, it is necessary to study what information each vehicle must have and to whom it must communicate for safe and efficient maneuvering in all possible conditions. This paper formulates the problem in terms of sensing and communicated information. By emulating platoons using a group of mobile robots, the authors demonstrate the feasibility of maneuvers (such as entering, exiting, and recuperating from an accident) using different distributed coordination strategies. The coordination strategies studied range from no communication to unidirectional or bidirectional exchanges between vehicles and to fully centralized decision by the leading vehicle. One particularity of this paper is that instead of assuming that the platoon leader or all vehicles globally monitor what is going on, only the vehicles involved in a particular maneuver are concerned, distributing decisions locally among the platoon. This paper reports experimental trials using robots having limited and directional perception of other things, using vision and obstacle avoidance sensing. Results confirm the feasibility of the coordination strategies in different conditions and various uses of communicated information to compensate for sensing limitations
Keywords :
collision avoidance; computer vision; distributed control; mobile robots; automated vehicles; computer vision; coordinated maneuvering; distributed coordination strategies; mobile robots; obstacle avoidance sensing; Automated highways; Automatic control; Communication system control; Control systems; Intelligent transportation systems; Mobile robots; Road safety; Road vehicles; Vehicle driving; Vehicle safety; Cooperative driving; distributed computational architecture; mobile robots; platooning;
Journal_Title :
Intelligent Transportation Systems, IEEE Transactions on
DOI :
10.1109/TITS.2006.883939