Integrating Inter-vehicular Communication, Vehicle Localization, and a Digital Map for Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control with Target Detection Loss

Abstract: Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) is an Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) that enables vehicle following with desired inter-vehicular distances. Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) is upgraded ACC that utilizes additional inter-vehicular wireless communication to share vehicle states such as acceleration to enable shorter gap following. Both ACC and CACC rely on range sensors such as radar to obtain the actual inter-vehicular distance for gap-keeping control. The range sensor may lose detection of the target, the preceding vehicle, on curvy roads or steep hills due to limited angle of view. Unfavourable weather conditions, target selection failure, or hardware issue may also result in target detection loss. During target detection loss, the vehicle following system usually falls back to Cruise Control (CC) wherein the follower vehicle maintains a constant speed. In this work, we propose an alternative way to obtain the inter-vehicular distance during target detection loss to continue vehicle following. The proposed algorithm integrates inter-vehicular communication, accurate vehicle localization, and a digital map with lane center information to approximate the inter-vehicular distance. In-lab robot following experiments demonstrated that the proposed algorithm provided desirable inter-vehicular distance approximation. Although the algorithm is intended for vehicle following application, it can also be used for other scenarios that demand vehicles' relative distance approximation. The work also showcases our in-lab development effort of robotic emulation of traffic for connected and automated vehicles.