This paper is an experience report of team Halmstad from the participation in a competition organised by the i-GAME project, the Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge 2016. The competition was held in Helmond, The Netherlands, during the last weekend of May 2016. We give an overview of our car’s control and communication system that was developed for the competition following the requirements and specifications of the i-GAME project. In particular, we describe our implementation of cooperative adaptive cruise control, our solution to the communication and logging requirements, as well as the high level decision making support. For the actual competition we did not manage to completely reach all of the goals set out by the organizers as well as ourselves. However, this did not prevent us from outperforming the competition. Moreover, the competition allowed us to collect data for further evaluation of our solutions to cooperative driving. Thus, we discuss what we believe were the strong points of our system, and discuss post-competition evaluation of the developments that were not fully integrated into our system during competition time. © 2000-2011 IEEE.

Platooning refers to an application, where a group of connected and automated vehicles follow a lead vehicle autonomously, with short inter-vehicular distances. At merging points on highways such as on-ramp, platoons could encounter manually driven vehicles, which are merging on to the highways. In some situations, the manually driven vehicles could end up between the platooning vehicles. Such situations are expected and known as “cut-in” situations. This paper presents a simulation study of a cut-in situation, where a platoon of five vehicles encounter a manually driven vehicle at a merging point of a highway. The manually driven vehicle is driven by 37 test persons using a driving simulator. For the platooning vehicles, two longitudinal controllers with four gap settings between the platooning vehicles, i.e. 15 meters, 22.5 meters, 30 meters, and 42.5 meters, are evaluated. Results summarizing cut-in behaviours and how the participants perceived the situation are presented. Furthermore, the situation is assessed using safety indicators based on time-to-collision.

Overtaking on rural roads may cause severe accidents when oncoming traffic is detected by a driver too late, or its speed is underestimated. Recently proposed cooperative overtaking assistance systems are based on real-time video transmission, where a video stream captured with a camera installed at the windshield of a vehicle is compressed, broadcast through the wireless channel, and displayed to the drivers of vehicles driving behind. In such a system, it is of ultimate importance to deliver video information about the opposite lane with low end-to-end latency and good visual quality. In this paper, we propose reallocating the wireless channel resources in favor of the part of the captured video frame containing the image of the oncoming vehicle. To achieve this goal, we apply automotive radar for oncoming vehicle detection, and we use the image of this vehicle as a region-of-interest (ROI) for the video rate control. We present the theoretical framework, which describes the basics of such an approach and can serve as a useful guideline for the future practical implementation of the overtaking assistance systems. The benefits of our proposal are demonstrated in relation to the practical scenario of H.264/Advance Video Coding (AVC), IEEE 802.11p/Wireless Access for Vehicular Environments (WAVE) intervehicle communication standards, and currently used automotive radars.

Intersection management is one of the most challenging problems within the transport system. Traffic light-based methods have been efficient but are not able to deal with the growing mobility and social challenges. On the other hand, the advancements of automation and communications have enabled cooperative intersection management, where road users, infrastructure, and traffic control centers are able to communicate and coordinate the traffic safely and efficiently. Major techniques and solutions for cooperative intersections are surveyed in this paper for both signalized and nonsignalized intersections, whereas focuses are put on the latter. Cooperative methods, including time slots and space reservation, trajectory planning, and virtual traffic lights, are discussed in detail. Vehicle collision warning and avoidance methods are discussed to deal with uncertainties. Concerning vulnerable road users, pedestrian collision avoidance methods are discussed. In addition, an introduction to major projects related to cooperative intersection management is presented. A further discussion of the presented works is given with highlights of future research topics. This paper serves as a comprehensive survey of the field, aiming at stimulating new methods and accelerating the advancement of automated and cooperative intersections. © 2015 IEEE.

Vehicular Ad hoc networks (VANET) are a key element of cooperative intelligent transport systems. One of the challenges in VANETs is dealing with awareness and congestion due to the high amount of messages received from the vehicles in communication range. As VANETs are used in critical applications, congestion on the receiver side caused by the buffering of the packets is a safety hazard. In this paper, we propose a streamwise queuing system on the receiver side and show how it improves the timeliness of the messages received and maintains the awareness of the system in a congestion situation. © Copyright 2017 IEEE

Drive-thru-Internet is a scenario in cooperative intelligent transportation systems (C-ITSs), where a road-side unit (RSU) provides multimedia services to vehicles that pass by. Performance of the drive-thru-Internet depends on various factors, including data traffic intensity, vehicle traffic density, and radio-link quality within the coverage area of the RSU, and must be evaluated at the stage of system design in order to fulfill the quality-of-service requirements of the customers in C-ITS. In this paper, we present an analytical framework that models downlink traffic in a drive-thru-Internet scenario by means of a multidimensional Markov process: the packet arrivals in the RSU buffer constitute Poisson processes and the transmission times are exponentially distributed. Taking into account the state space explosion problem associated with multidimensional Markov processes, we use iterative perturbation techniques to calculate the stationary distribution of the Markov chain. Our numerical results reveal that the proposed approach yields accurate estimates of various performance metrics, such as the mean queue content and the mean packet delay for a wide range of workloads. © 2019 IEEE.

This paper describes the Halmstad University entry in the Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge, which is a competition in vehicle platooning. Cooperative platooning has the potential to improve traffic flow by mitigating shock wave effects, which otherwise may occur in dense traffic. A longitudinal controller that uses information exchanged via wireless communication with other cooperative vehicles to achieve string-stable platooning is developed. The controller is integrated into a production vehicle, together with a positioning system, communication system, and human–machine interface (HMI). A highly modular system architecture enabled rapid development and testing of the various subsystems. In the competition, which took place in May 2011 on a closed-off highway in The Netherlands, the Halmstad University team finished second among nine competing teams.

Cooperative driving is based on wireless communications between vehicles and between vehicles and roadside infrastructure, aiming for increased traffic flow and traffic safety, while decreasing fuel consumption and emissions. To support and accelerate the introduction of cooperative vehicles in everyday traffic, in 2011, nine international teams joined the Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge (GCDC). The challenge was to perform platooning, in which vehicles drive in road trains with short intervehicle distances. The results were reported in a Special Issue of IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, published in September 2012 [item 1 in the Appendix]. © 2000-2011 IEEE.

Cooperative adaptive cruise control and platooning are well-known applications in the field of cooperative automated driving. However, extension toward maneuvering is desired to accommodate common highway maneuvers, such as merging, and to enable urban applications. To this end, a layered control architecture is adopted. In this architecture, the tactical layer hosts the interaction protocols, describing the wireless information exchange to initiate the vehicle maneuvers, supported by a novel wireless message set, whereas the operational layer involves the vehicle controllers to realize the desired maneuvers. This hierarchical approach was the basis for the Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge (GCDC), which was held in May 2016 in The Netherlands. The GCDC provided the opportunity for participating teams to cooperatively execute a highway lane-reduction scenario and an urban intersection-crossing scenario. The GCDC was set up as a competition and, hence, also involving assessment of the teams' individual performance in a cooperative setting. As a result, the hierarchical architecture proved to be a viable approach, whereas the GCDC appeared to be an effective instrument to advance the field of cooperative automated driving. © Copyright 2017 IEEE - All rights reserved.

Vehicle-to-vehicle communication is a key technology for achieving increased perception for automated vehicles, where the communication enables virtual sensing by means of sensors in other vehicles. In addition, this technology also allows detection and recognition of objects that are out-of-sight. This paper presents a trust system that allows a cooperative and automated vehicle to make more reliable and safe decisions. The system evaluates the current situation and generates a trust index indicating the level of trust in the environment, the ego vehicle, and the surrounding vehicles. This research goes beyond secure communication and concerns the verification of the received data on a system level. The results show that the proposed method is capable of correctly identifying various traffic situations and how the trust index is used while manoeuvring in a platoon merge scenario. © Copyright 2017 IEEE - All rights reserved.

With an increasing amount of data in intelligent transportation systems, methods are needed to automatically extract general representations that accurately predict not only known tasks but also similar tasks that can emerge in the future. Creation of low-dimensional representations can be unsupervised or can exploit various labels in multi-task learning (when goal tasks are known) or transfer learning (when they are not) settings. Finding a general, low-dimensional representation suitable for multiple tasks is an important step toward knowledge discovery in aware intelligent transportation systems. This paper evaluates several approaches mapping high-dimensional sensor data from Volvo trucks into a low-dimensional representation that is useful for prediction. Original data are bivariate histograms, with two types--turbocharger and engine--considered. Low-dimensional representations were evaluated in a supervised fashion by mean equal error rate (EER) using a random forest classifier on a set of 27 1-vs-Rest detection tasks. Results from unsupervised learning experiments indicate that using an autoencoder to create an intermediate representation, followed by $t$-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding, is the most effective way to create low-dimensional representation of the original bivariate histogram. Individually, $t$-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding offered best results for 2-D or 3-D and classical autoencoder for 6-D or 10-D representations. Using multi-task learning, combining unsupervised and supervised objectives on all 27 available tasks, resulted in 10-D representations with a significantly lower EER compared to the original 400-D data. In transfer learning setting, with topmost diverse tasks used for representation learning, 10-D representations achieved EER comparable to the original representation.