Virtual vehicle approach for longitudinal control in urban environments

Abstract

Dealing with the control of autonomous vehicles on urban environments is a highly complex task due to the number of possible scenarios to consider. On this work, we present a virtual vehicle approach for the management of several urban manoeuvres by considering them as an Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) problem, from the longitudinal point of view. This solution is based on a centralised communication system which manages and analyses all the information incoming from the vehicles and the infrastructure on a limited area. In order to validate the performance of the proposal, an experiment has been carried out at the test track of the AUTOPIA program. On the experiment, several vehicles over an intersection were controlled by the central system. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.