Autonomous vehicles do not intrinsically improve traffic since they optimize towards reaching their own goals. Cooperative driving, on the other hand, aims for optimizing the collective behavior, thus having the potential to improve the traffic system.
2019 VEHITS conference
The purpose of the 5th International Conference on Vehicle Technology and Intelligent Transport Systems (VEHITS) is to bring together engineers, researchers and practitioners interested in the advances and applications in the field of Vehicle Technology and Intelligent Transport Systems. This conference focuses on innovative applications, tools and platforms in all technology areas such as signal processing, wireless communications, informatics and electronics, related to different kinds of vehicles, including cars, off-road vehicles, trains, ships, underwater vehicles, or flying machines, and the intelligent transportation systems that connect and manage large numbers of vehicles, not only in the context of smart cities but in many other application domains.
2getthere’s Jeroen Ploeg is keynote speaker at the conference, presenting the paper ‘From Platooning to Maneuvering’ authored together with Redmer de Haan.
From Platooning to Maneuvering
Autonomous vehicles do not intrinsically improve traffic since they optimize towards reaching their own goals. Cooperative driving, on the other hand, aims for optimizing the collective behavior, thus having the potential to improve the traffic system. Connectivity is instrumental for cooperative driving because traffic participants can express and share their intention more easily and precisely. When combined with vehicle automation, a powerful approach arises for improving traffic efficiency and safety.
A well-known application of cooperative automated driving (CAD) is cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) or platooning, which improves traffic throughput by adopting very short intervehicle distances. This is particularly of interest in automated transit systems (people movers) which, when used for first-/last-mile transportation, must have a high transport capacity. Also truck platooning is a promising application because fuel consumption decreases due to reduced aerodynamic drag at short distances. To fully exploit these potential benefits, a platoon needs to be string stable, which refers to attenuation of the effects of disturbances in upstream direction along the platoon. String stability contributes to safety, but it is only a necessary condition, not a sufficient one. To also guarantee safety in the presence of failing communication or common threats such as cutting in of other vehicles, additional measures are required which are only addressed in literature to a limited extent.
Next to ongoing developments in the field of platooning, cooperative automated maneuvering attracts attention to an increasing extent, acknowledging the fact that traffic is not a one-dimensional string of vehicles. Many approaches are still investigated in this field. One such approach relies on explicit decision making, employing so-called interaction protocols; This approach was illustrated by i-GAME, a European-funded project, whereas other projects, such as Autonet2030, adopt an optimization-based approach for path planning.
In summary, CACC and platooning are promising first applications of CAD, but further research and development in the field of safety is required, especially when considering the current world-wide standardization and road approval activities. At the same time, the application domain is extended towards cooperative automated maneuvering, ultimately leading to a truly ‘automated intelligent transportation system’.
Full Paper
The full conference paper is available here: https://www.2getthere.eu/wp-content/uploads/White-paper-2getthere-by-Jeroen-Ploeg-on-Cooperative-Automated-Driving-From-Platooning-to-Maneuvering-for-VEHITS-conference.pdf