Abstract
A platoon comprises a string of consecutive highly automated vehicles traveling together. Platooning allows for increased road utilization and reduced fuel consumption due to short inter-vehicular distances. Safety in terms of guaranteeing no rear-end collisions is of utmost importance for platooning systems to be deployed in practice. We compare how safely emergency braking can be handled by emerging vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications on the one hand and by radar-based measurements of existing automatic emergency braking systems (AEBS) on the other. We show that even under conservative assumptions on the V2V communications, such an approach significantly outperforms AEBS with an ideal radar sensor in terms of allowed inter-vehicle distances and response times. Furthermore, we design two emergency braking strategies for platooning based on V2V communications. The first braking strategy assumes centralized coordination by the leading vehicle and exploits necessary optimal conditions of a constrained optimization problem, whereas the second – the more conservative solution – assumes only local information and is distributed in nature. Both strategies are also compared with the AEBS.
Highlights
A platoon comprises a number of vehicles traveling autonomously together with short inter-vehicle distances [2] and facilitated by both traditional radar sensors and emergent V2V radio communication
In addition to improved safety with respect to manual driving with no automation in place, platooning technology contributes to better fuel economy [3], [4] due to the slipstream effect, reducing the impact on the climate. [4] reports figures from 2% to 21% for fuel savings, which means that the vehicle can save up to 21% of the fuel if it follows another one in a platooning formation
We demonstrate that based on those metrics, minimum inter-vehicle distance (IVD)s that allow achieving the predefined level of safety, can be calculated
Summary
A platoon comprises a number of vehicles traveling autonomously together with short inter-vehicle distances [2] and facilitated by both traditional radar sensors and emergent V2V radio communication. Automotive radars are deployed in many vehicles for safety enhancements via features such as adaptive cruise control (ACC) [5] and AEBS [6] With the latter, a vehicle can sharply decelerate without driver involvement to avoid a potential collision or to mitigate the consequences thereof. Introduction of V2V communications enables cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) [7] and emergency electronic brake lights (EEBL) [8] With the latter, a vehicle broadcasts Decentralized Environmental Notification Message (DENM) when its deceleration value reaches a predefined emergency braking threshold value. Standard ISO/PAS 21448, known as Safety of the Intended Functionality or SOTIF, provides guidance on minimizing safety hazards that occur due to fundamental deficiencies of sensor technologies [12] In this context, inherent unreliability of V2V communications is one kind of such a sensing limitation.
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