Clusters Of Vehicles Research Articles

A simulation tool for automated platooning in mixed highway scenarios

Automated platooning is one of the most challenging fields in the domain of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Conceptually, platooning means creating clusters of vehicles which closely follow each other autonomously without action of the driver, neither for accelerating, nor for braking. This leads to several important benefits from substantially improved road throughput to increased safety. The control of such platoons depends on two components: First, radar is typically to be used to control the distance between the vehicles, and secondly, Inter-Vehicle Communication (IVC) helps managing the entire platoon allowing cars to join or to leave the group whenever necessary. Platooning systems have been mostly investigated in controlled environments such as dedicated highways with centralized management. However, platooning-enabled cars will be deployed gradually and might have to travel on highways together with other non-automated vehicles. We developed a combined traffic and network simulator for studying strategies and protocols needed for managing platoons in such mixed scenarios. We show the models needed and present first results using a simple IVC-based platoon management as a proof of concept.

Antenna array synthesis with clusters of unmanned aerial vehicles

In this paper, we investigate the use of formations of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) as phased antenna arrays. This will help to improve communications with clusters of small unmanned aerial vehicles which are currently constrained by on-board power limitations. The problem of maximizing the power output from the array in the direction of the receiver is posed as an optimization problem which happens to be non-convex; a relaxation of this problem is then solved as a computationally tractable (convex) Second-Order Conic Program (SOCP). The performance obtained by the simplified approach is then tested against rigorous numerical bounds obtained using Semidefinite Programming (SDP) duality theory; these bounds are of independent interest in antenna theory. In order to maintain the objective value close to the optimal when the vehicles deviate from their positions (due to wind gusts, for example), a simple linear control law is proposed. Simulation results are given to show the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.