Control-aware Communication for Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control

Utilizing vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication technologies, vehicle platooning systems are expected to realize a new paradigm of cooperative driving with higher levels of traffic safety and efficiency. Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) need to have proper awareness of the traffic context. However, as the quantity of interconnected entities grows, the expense of communication will become a significant factor. As a result, the cooperative platoon's performance will be influenced by the communication strategy. While maintaining desired levels of performance, periodic communication can be relaxed to more flexible aperiodic or event-triggered implementations. In this paper, we propose a control-aware communication solution for vehicle platoons. The method uses a fully distributed control-aware communication strategy, attempting to decrease the usage of communication resources while still preserving the desired closed-loop performance characteristics. We then leverage Model-Based Communication (MBC) to improve cooperative vehicle perception in non-ideal communication and propose a solution that combines control-aware communication with MBC for cooperative control of vehicle platoons. Our approach achieves a significant reduction in the average communication rate ($47\%$) while only slightly reducing control performance (e.g., less than $1\%$ speed deviation). Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate the benefits of combined control-aware communication with MBC for cooperative control of vehicle platoons.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2203.1577

Development and Performance Evaluation of a Connected Vehicle Application Development Platform (CVDeP)

Connected vehicle (CV) application developers need a development platform to build, test and debug real-world CV applications, such as safety, mobility, and environmental applications, in edge-centric cyber-physical systems. Our study objective is to develop and evaluate a scalable and secure CV application development platform (CVDeP) that enables application developers to build, test and debug CV applications in realtime. CVDeP ensures that the functional requirements of the CV applications meet the corresponding requirements imposed by the specific applications. We evaluated the efficacy of CVDeP using two CV applications (one safety and one mobility application) and validated them through a field experiment at the Clemson University Connected Vehicle Testbed (CU-CVT). Analyses prove the efficacy of CVDeP, which satisfies the functional requirements (i.e., latency and throughput) of a CV application while maintaining scalability and security of the platform and applications

Hybrid-Vehfog: A Robust Approach for Reliable Dissemination of Critical Messages in Connected Vehicles

Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANET) enable efficient communication between vehicles with the aim of improving road safety. However, the growing number of vehicles in dense regions and obstacle shadowing regions like Manhattan and other downtown areas leads to frequent disconnection problems resulting in disrupted radio wave propagation between vehicles. To address this issue and to transmit critical messages between vehicles and drones deployed from service vehicles to overcome road incidents and obstacles, we proposed a hybrid technique based on fog computing called Hybrid-Vehfog to disseminate messages in obstacle shadowing regions, and multi-hop technique to disseminate messages in non-obstacle shadowing regions. Our proposed algorithm dynamically adapts to changes in an environment and benefits in efficiency with robust drone deployment capability as needed. Performance of Hybrid-Vehfog is carried out in Network Simulator (NS-2) and Simulation of Urban Mobility (SUMO) simulators. The results showed that Hybrid-Vehfog outperformed Cloud-assisted Message Downlink Dissemination Scheme (CMDS), Cross-Layer Broadcast Protocol (CLBP), PEer-to-Peer protocol for Allocated REsource (PrEPARE), Fog-Named Data Networking (NDN) with mobility, and flooding schemes at all vehicle densities and simulation times

Vision-Based Lane-Changing Behavior Detection Using Deep Residual Neural Network

Accurate lane localization and lane change detection are crucial in advanced driver assistance systems and autonomous driving systems for safer and more efficient trajectory planning. Conventional localization devices such as Global Positioning System only provide road-level resolution for car navigation, which is incompetent to assist in lane-level decision making. The state of art technique for lane localization is to use Light Detection and Ranging sensors to correct the global localization error and achieve centimeter-level accuracy, but the real-time implementation and popularization for LiDAR is still limited by its computational burden and current cost. As a cost-effective alternative, vision-based lane change detection has been highly regarded for affordable autonomous vehicles to support lane-level localization. A deep learning-based computer vision system is developed to detect the lane change behavior using the images captured by a front-view camera mounted on the vehicle and data from the inertial measurement unit for highway driving. Testing results on real-world driving data have shown that the proposed method is robust with real-time working ability and could achieve around 87% lane change detection accuracy. Compared to the average human reaction to visual stimuli, the proposed computer vision system works 9 times faster, which makes it capable of helping make life-saving decisions in time

The State-of-the-art of Coordinated Ramp Control with Mixed Traffic Conditions

Ramp metering, a traditional traffic control strategy for conventional vehicles, has been widely deployed around the world since the 1960s. On the other hand, the last decade has witnessed significant advances in connected and automated vehicle (CAV) technology and its great potential for improving safety, mobility and environmental sustainability. Therefore, a large amount of research has been conducted on cooperative ramp merging for CAVs only. However, it is expected that the phase of mixed traffic, namely the coexistence of both human-driven vehicles and CAVs, would last for a long time. Since there is little research on the system-wide ramp control with mixed traffic conditions, the paper aims to close this gap by proposing an innovative system architecture and reviewing the state-of-the-art studies on the key components of the proposed system. These components include traffic state estimation, ramp metering, driving behavior modeling, and coordination of CAVs. All reviewed literature plot an extensive landscape for the proposed system-wide coordinated ramp control with mixed traffic conditions.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure, IEEE INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS CONFERENCE - ITSC 201