This paper deals with cooperative driving of automated vehicles on highways with data transmission based on inter-vehicle communications. It presents a data transmission algorithm in a platoon for a unidirectional medium and an omni-directional one under both a steady state and a transient state. The algorithm is featured by that the throughput rate is larger than a conventional system, when the number of vehicles in a platoon is less than 15. This paper also focuses on merging, which is the typical case of cooperative driving, and presents a merging control algorithm that makes the best use of the inter-vehicle communications. The merging is performed with a virtual vehicle generated by mapping a vehicle on a lane onto an object lane in order to longitudinally control a vehicle on the object lane. The results of a simulation study and an indoor experiment show the feasibility of the algorithms of the data transmission and merging control. (A*)
Samenvatting