Abstract
Most of the vehicle manufacturers aim to deploy level-5 fully autonomous ground vehicles (FAGVs) on city roads in 2021 by leveraging extensive existing knowledge about sensors, actuators, telematics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) gained from the level-3 and level-4 autonomy. FAGVs by executing non-trivial sequences of events with decimetre-level accuracy live in Smart City (SC) and their integration with all the SC components and domains using real-time data analytics is urgent to establish better swarm intelligent systems and a safer and optimised harmonious smart environment enabling cooperative FAGVs-SC automation systems. The challenges of urbanisation, if unmet urgently, would entail severe economic and environmental impacts. The integration of FAGVs with SC helps improve the sustainability of a city and the functional and efficient deployment of hand over wheels on robotized city roads with behaviour coordination. SC can enable the exploitation of the full potential of FAGVs with embedded centralised systems within SC with highly distributed systems in a concept of Automation of Everything (AoE). This article proposes a synergistic integrated FAGV-SC holistic framework - FAGVinSCF in which all the components of SC and FAGVs involving recent and impending technological advancements are moulded to make the transformation from today's driving society to future's next-generation driverless society smoother and truly make self-driving technology a harmonious part of our cities with sustainable urban development. Based on FAGVinSCF, a simulation platform is built both to model the varying penetration levels of FAGV into mixed traffic and to perform the optimal self-driving behaviours of FAGV swarms. The results show that FAGVinSCF improves the urban traffic flow significantly without huge changes to the traffic infrastructure. With this framework, the concept of Cooperative Intelligent Transportation Systems (C-ITS) is transformed into the concept of Automated ITS (A-ITS). Cities currently designed for cars can turn into cities developed for citizens using FAGVinSCF enabling more sustainable cities.
Highlights
Knight Rider, the television series (1982-1986), with Michael Knight and the intelligent fully autonomous science-fiction car named KITT is becoming a science-fact in our cities
fully autonomous ground vehicles (AGVs) (FAGVs) cannot be treated as independent objects, but a part of its surrounding within Smart City (SC)
In our simulation study, the traffic mobility is getting optimised with a penetration level of over 70% and no more significant improvement can be realised after this level where the road segments with the intersection points already become optimised, which helps avoid getting congested. These results suggest that traffic flow can be optimised within mixed traffic without huge changes to the infrastructure where the penetration level of FAGVs gets dominant with the proposed framework
Summary
Knight Rider, the television series (1982-1986), with Michael Knight and the intelligent fully autonomous science-fiction car named KITT is becoming a science-fact in our cities. The idea of driverless vehicles was introduced many years ago when autopilot systems were designed for airplanes [1]. Sixty-five years of automotive baby steps paving the way to the autonomous ground vehicles (AGVs) are summarised by Ross [2] starting with the invention of modern cruise. How will AGVs, in other words, self-driving cars transform our cities? How will Smart Cities (SCs) transform AGVs? We envision a future that both Level-5 fully AGVs (FAGVs) and SCs will transform one another drastically. All the big players in the automotive industry envisage a future for driverless vehicles and they have already taken notable actions within their
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