No abstract

Abstract-The major benefits of driving vehicles in controlled close formations such as platoons are that of increasing traffic fluidity and reducing air pollution. While V2V communications is requisite for platooning stability, the existing radio communications technologies (e.g., the IEEE 802.11p) suffer from poor performance in highly dense road scenarios, which are exactly to be created by platooning. This paper studies the applicability of visible light communications (VLC) system for information exchange between the platoon members. A complete VLC model is built enabling precise calculations of Bit-Error-Rate (BER) affected by inter-vehicle distance, background noise, incidence angle and receiver electrical bandwidth. Based on our analytical model, the optical parameters suiting platooning application are defined. Finally, a SIMULINK model is developed to study the performances of a platooning longitudinal and lateral control, where VLC is used for vehicle-to-vehicle information exchange. Our study demonstrates the feasibility of VLC-based platooning control even in the presence of optical noise at significant levels and up to certain degree of road curvature.

With cooperative intelligent transportation systems (C-ITS), vulnerable road users (VRU) safety can be enhanced by multiple means. On one hand, perception systems are based on embedded sensors to protect VRUs. However, such systems may fail due to the sensors' visibility conditions and imprecision. On the other hand, Vehicle-to-Pedestrian (V2P) communication can contribute to the VRU safety by allowing vehicles and pedestrians to exchange information. This solution is, however, largely affected by the reliability of the exchanged information, which most generally is the GPS data. Since perception and communication have complementary features, we can expect that a fusion between these two approaches can be a solution to the VRU safety. In this work, we propose a cooperative system that combines the outputs of communication and perception. After introducing theoretical models of both individual approaches, we develop a probabilistic association between perception and V2P communication information by means of multi-hypothesis tracking (MHT). Experimental studies are conducted to demonstrate the applicability of this approach in real-world environments. Our results show that the cooperative VRU protection system can benefit of the redundancy coming from the perception and communication technologies both in line-of-sight (LOS) and non-LOS (NLOS) conditions. We establish that the performances of this system are influenced by the classification performances of the perception system and by the accuracy of the GPS positioning transmitted by the communication system.

The existing R&D efforts for protecting vulnerable road users (VRU) are mainly based on perception techniques, which aim to detect VRUs utilizing vehicle embedded sensors. The efficiency of such a technique is largely affected by the sensor's visibility condition. Vehicle-to-Pedestrian (V2P) communication can also contribute to the VRU safety by allowing vehicles and pedestrians to exchange information. This solution is, however, largely affected by the reliability of the exchanged information, which most generally is the GPS data. Since perception and communication have complementary features, we can expect that a combination of such approaches can be a solution to the VRU safety. This is the motivation of the current work. We develop theoretical models to present the characteristics of perception and communications systems. Experimental studies are conducted to compare the performances of these techniques in real-world environments. Our results show that the perception system reliably detects pedestrians and other objects within 50 m of range in the line-of-sight (LOS) condition. In contrast, the V2P communication coverage is approximately 340 and 200 meters in LOS and non-LOS (NLOS) conditions, respectively. However, the communication-based system fails to correctly position the VRU w.r.t the vehicle, preventing the system from meeting the safety requirement. Finally, we propose a cooperative system that combines the outputs of the communication and perception systems.

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