Adapting the Virtual Platooning Concept to Roundabout Crossing

Abstract

Despite the tremendous growth of research regarding fully autonomous vehicles in the past few years, many safety critical scenarios, such as the crossing of roundabouts, are still open issues. One of the main challenge is to deal with the lack of visibility in complex environments. Vehicle-tovehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications offer an appealing solution to handle these situations in a cooperative way. To avoid computing an ad hoc control strategy for every possible scenario, we propose in this paper to adapt the concept of virtual platooning to roundabout crossing. This idea allows a single platooning control law to handle complex scenarios such as intersection and roundabout crossings. This work combines the use of high definition maps and a curvilinear coordinates framework to deal with any kind of roundabouts. The proposed approach is not limited to communicating autonomous vehicles but can also be used with manually driven communicating vehicles or non-communicating vehicles with the help on the infrastructure. A formal proof of the correctness of this approach is given and simulations have been carried out with a high definition map of a real roundabout. We also introduce a novel graphical representation called safety diagram to study de performances of our approach.

High Integrity Lane-level Occupancy Estimation of Road Obstacles Through LiDAR and HD Map Data Fusion

“…Finally, to demonstrate the usefulness of the method, it has been qualitatively validated in an autonomous driving scenario. The roundabout crossing algorithm presented in [24] has been implemented replacing vehicles positions by their occupancy intervals extracted by LiDAR detection and uncertainty injection in curvilinear domain. Autonomous driving tests were conducted on the Séville experimental test track of the University of technology of Compiègne.…”

Roundabout Crossing With Interval Occupancy and Virtual Instances of Road Users

“…It is well known that map-matching ambiguities may arise when a road splits or when the vehicle changes lanes. Our preferred map-matching process is the method described in [24], where multiple candidate lanes can be simultaneously occupied by creating virtual instances of the MD vehicle, one for each lane that may potentially be occupied. This technique is detailed in section III-A.…”

“…In [24] we showed that using virtual vehicles along the lanes of an HD map is a good way of predicting the dynamic situation in a roundabout so as to control the longitudinal behavior of an AD vehicle. In [25] we improved and extended this method to a more complex case, i.e., a two-lane roundabout.…”

Synchronous Roundabouts with Rotating Priority Sectors (SYROPS) : High Capacity and Safety for Conventional and Autonomous Vehicles

“…These autonomous vehicle coordination technologies (automatic driving) are not applicable when driving conventional vehicles with driver, so it is necessary to improve the performance and safety of roundabouts through procedures that are applicable to both driver and autonomous vehicles. The problem of roundabout crossing using virtual platoons of autonomous and manually driven vehicles is studied in [26]. The term virtual platoon applies to vehicles that may circulate Preprints (www.preprints.org) | NOT PEER-REVIEWED | Posted: 10 September 2020 doi:10.20944/preprints202009.0214.v1…”