Cybercar Cooperation for Safe Intersections

Abstract

The paper addresses the problem of motion autonomy of Cybercars across a urban intersection. Cybercars are small electric city vehicles aimed at navigating autonomously. In the context of a crossing, the motion generation together with its safety are critical issues. The proposed approach to the problem lies in the coupling of perception and planning capabilities. A new car to car communication algorithm provides necessary information to a trajectory planner capable of iteratively generate safe trajectories within a dynamic environment in order to drive Cybercars safely through the intersection. The main contributions of this work are the development and integration of these modules into one single application, considering explicitly the constraints related to the environment and the system and to provide an original answer to the problem of intelligent crossing.

Control architecture for Cybernetic Transportation Systems in urban environments

“…Moreover, different communication systems, ad hoc networks and Optimized Link State Routing Protocol (OLSR) to emulate real traffic situation, as well as intersection, safety implementation, ICS and overtaking among Cybercars were tested [12], [13]. Other researchers used the concept of decision making for driverless city vehicles in simulation.…”

“…The vehicles are linked through a mesh-network over WIFI with OLSR Ad-Hoc protocol [13]. Position, speed, acceleration and other emergency situations can be transferred with Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communications.…”

Autonomous vehicle control systems for safe crossroads

“…Even though slightly different, work such as that connected to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) competition (Thrun et al, 2006;Urmson et al, 2008;Campbell et al, 2007) has concentrated on detecting the occupation of the intersection by means of artificial vision and laser radar so as to be able to traverse it as soon as possible. Other approaches, such as those of the INRIA (Bouraoui et al, 2006) and the University of Griffith (Kolodko and Vlacic, 2003;Baber et al, 2005) solve the problem for two vehicles at an intersection of two one-way roads. Considering the possible future trajectories of the two vehicles, they determine whether the intersection is safe, and, if not, the vehicle without road priority waits until it can continue its route with no risk of collision.…”

Achievable safety of driverless ground vehicles

“…A possible future for driverless vehicles in urban environment is the deployment of "immaterial tramways" [23], [24], [25]. Restricting the movement of the vehicle to a fixed path seems to be perceived by humans as a safer option.…”