An experimental platform for autonomous bus development

Abstract

Nowadays, with highly developed instrumentation, sensing and actuation technologies, it is possible to foresee an important advance in the field of autonomous and/or semi-autonomous transportation systems. Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) have been subjected to very active research for many years, and Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) is one area of major interest. Among the most promising transport infrastructures, the articulated bus is an interesting, low cost, high occupancy capacity and friendly option. In this paper, an experimental platform for research on the automatic control of an articulated bus is presented. The aim of the platform is to allow full experimentation in real conditions for testing technological developments and control algorithms. The experimental platform consists of a mobile component (a commercial articulated bus) fully instrumented and a ground test area composed of asphalt roads inside the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) premises. This paper focuses also on the development of a human machine interface to ease progress in control system evaluation. Some experimental results are presented in order to show the potential of the proposed platform.