Experimental evaluation of a co-operative driving setup based on inter-vehicle communication.

This paper presents the design and evaluation of a co-operative longitudinal controller for a cluster of vehicles with inter-vehicle communication (IVC). By applying IVC a smooth traffic flow can be realized. The proposed controller can actively control the throttle, the brake and the gears of the used vehicles in order to do so. The longitudinal controller uses two loops; the outer loop computes a desired acceleration, which the inner loop uses as a reference. The outer loop uses acceleration, velocity and position information from the own vehicle and preceding vehicles. These three states first have to be estimated from various sensors in the vehicle. An Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) has been used for fusing the signals from the different sensors. The used signals are available from DGPS and from inertial sensors on the test-vehicles. Real-life experiments with the proposed algorithm for a cluster of three vehicles will be evaluated.