Safe trajectory planning for autonomous intersection management by using vehicle to infrastructure communication

Wuthishuwong et al. EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking Safe trajectory planning for autonomous intersection management by using vehicle to infrastructure communication Chairit Wuthishuwong 0 2 Ansgar Traechtler 0 2 Torsten Bruns 1 0 Heinz Nixdorf Institute, Control Engineering and Mechatronics Department, University Paderborn , Furstenallee 11, Paderborn 33102 , Germany 1 Projektgruppe Entwerfstechnik Mechatronik , Fraunhofer IPT, Zukunftsmeile 1, 33102 Paderborn , Germany 2 Heinz Nixdorf Institute, Control Engineering and Mechatronics Department, University Paderborn , Furstenallee 11, Paderborn 33102 , Germany The development of autonomous vehicle or self-driving car integrates with the wireless communication technology which would be a forward step for road transportation in the near future. The autonomous crossing of an intersection with an autonomous vehicle will play a crucial role in the future of intelligent transportation system (ITS). The fundamental objectives of this work are to manage autonomous vehicles crossing an intersection with no collisions, maintaining that a vehicle drives continuously, and to decrease the waiting time at an intersection. In this paper, a discrete model of the one-way single intersection is designed. The vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication is implemented to exchange information between a vehicle and an intersection manager which is the roadside infrastructure. The safe trajectory of autonomous vehicles for the autonomous intersection management is determined and presented by using discrete mathematics. Autonomous vehicle; Self-driving car; Intelligent transportation system (ITS); Vehicle-to-infrastructure communication (V2I); Autonomous intersection management (AIM); Discrete mathematics 1 Introduction The vehicle technology has grown rapidly in the past decade. Several systems have been installed into commercial vehicles to assist the driver to provide a more comfortable drive, including improving of the safety of the driver, passenger, and the pedestrian or cyclist. Recently, there has been a highly increased activity in the development of the autonomous vehicle research, which was initiated in 2005 by the first competition of autonomous vehicles. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Grand Challenge was organized. In 2007, the DARPA Urban Challenge showed the progression of the autonomous vehicle. Several teams successfully developed a vehicle that has the ability to drive itself and achieve the assigned task. As a result, the self-driving car or autonomous vehicle is now successfully developed by many research groups either in universities or more recently by private companies [1-3]. They proved the performance of driving in a realtraffic environment, autonomously with the capability of safety. It showed that the use of this technology is possible in the near future. Already, some cities in the USA currently allow the autonomous vehicle to drive on the same street as other vehicles, legally. Furthermore, the increased use of wireless communication technology is making a huge contribution to applications with the cooperation of multiple robots. Many multiple robots and cooperation researches were focusing on the mobile robot application, e.g., robot soccer, task allocation, area exploration, robot formation, and swarm robotics [4-7]. With the existing technology of wireless communication, the application of autonomous intersection management (AIM) (Additional file 1) is possible. The safety of driving is the first priority of road transportation. An intersection, especially, is considered one of the high-risk places for accidents to occur. In addition, traffic congestion is also very important and serves as the second objective of the traffic management. There are two different approaches from previous research studies that developed the collision avoidance at an intersection: with and without communication. Without communication, the stand-alone autonomous vehicle is equipped with several sensors to measure its state, e.g., GPS, position, orientation, and velocity, which is now in general use. Also used, an environment sensor to measure the vehicles surrounding, e.g., the laser range finder, radar, and camera, were used to locate the static and dynamic obstacles around a vehicle and then plan a collision free path by using the stop and go technique [8,9]. With communication, [10] presented the latest wireless communication standard for vehicle communication. The IEEE 802.11p with the spectrum of 5.9GHz band, dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) is the standard that was developed for use only with vehicle communication. The time scheduling method by means of intelligent agents was introduced in [11]. It determined the arrival time of a vehicle and the time that a vehicle would stay at an intersection by sharing the state information and then passing it back to the following vehicle by using mobile ad hoc networks. Hafner et al. [12] presented the automated collision avoidance at an intersection between two vehicles, using vehicle-to-vehicle communication (V2V). It used V2V to share the state information of two vehicles to find the potential collision area and then control the longitudinal velocities of both vehicles to prevent them from reaching the collision area at the same time. Similarly, [13] proposed the method of sharing the state of vehicle inertia to create the navigation function that creates a safe and smooth path without fully stopping at the intersection. Sheng et al. [14] propose the method of intersection collision groups: each vehicle broadcasts its collision situation based on the path selection. When a vehicle reaches the communication range, the collision free path was determined by comparing the initial member of collision group and of another incoming vehicle. The driving speed was cooperatively calculated for the safe crossing of the intersection. The proposed concept in [15] consists of intersection geometry, to map the collision region by using the first-come first-serve (FCFS) principle to manage a vehicle crossing an intersection. Another method is using vehicle-to-infrastructure communication (V2I). Bruns and Trchtler [16] and Bruns [17] used the concept of network flow to model the intersection. The intersection was separated into small equal connected sections. The incoming vehicle has to reserve nodes based on the selected route, and the safe trajectory is determined by using dynamic programming. This resulted in the centralized control principle. Moreover, the extended study in [18] was considering optimization of multiple objectives to improve driving efficiency. The fuel consumption and duration of a journey were minimized by using the technique of dynamic programming. Autonomous intersection management with the call ahead concept was presented by [19-21]. Every car must send a reservation message to the intersection manager, and i (...truncated)