On the needs and requirements arising from connected and automated driving

Future 5G systems have set a goal to support mission-critical Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communications and they contribute to an important step towards connected and automated driving. To achieve this goal, the communication technologies should be designed based on a solid understanding of the new V2X applications and the related requirements and challenges. In this regard, we provide a description of the main V2X application categories and their representative use cases selected based on an analysis of the future needs of cooperative and automated driving. We also present a methodology on how to derive the network related requirements from the automotive specific requirements. The methodology can be used to analyze the key requirements of both existing and future V2X use cases

Design and implementation of a cloud-based membership system for vehicular cooperation

Tese de mestrado, Engenharia Informática (Arquitetura, Sistemas e Redes de Computadores) Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, 2019Personal vehicles such as cars are the transportation method chosen by most people, and thanks to this, our cities are built around them, with roads that go to any place you could ever need to go. Given the number of daily vehicles in our cities, the pollution levels and traffic congestion are higher than ever. Traffic makes everyone’s life harder, and just creates more pollution, which ends up making living in a city a lot harder than it should. Multiples solutions have been proposed to help fixing this problem, but none of them work as expected or in the long run. Nowadays, the first autonomous vehicles are starting to appear, and consequently, bringing the opportunity to once again, try to solve this problem. Current autonomous vehicles are simple and still not a viable option for daily transportation, but everything shows that is likely to change soon. They already help a lot with traffic and pollution, but sadly, not as much as we would like, which means it will not be enough in the long run and another solution is needed. The existing ones make their decisions solely based on their own sensors and nothing else. That is, it is the only view they have of the external world. Even considering this, these vehicles are still not perfect as there is still a subject that was not well explored, communication between vehicles. Vehicle coordination is the next big step and an essential missing factor that has to be considered for the next generation of autonomous vehicles. By being able to communicate with each other, vehicles will be able to cooperate and share useful information about their own decisions or the outside environment. A solution such as this would help considerably with our current traffic issue and we believe that this could be a long term solution with the advantage of reducing pollution (due to higher efficiency), higher passenger security, and making everyone’s lives easier

Cooperative control of autonomous connected vehicles from a Networked Control perspective: Theory and experimental validation

Formation control of autonomous connected vehicles is one of the typical problems addressed in the general context of networked control systems. By leveraging this paradigm, a platoon composed by multiple connected and automated vehicles is represented as one-dimensional network of dynamical agents, in which each agent only uses its neighboring information to locally control its motion, while it aims to achieve certain global coordination with all other agents. Within this theoretical framework, control algorithms are traditionally designed based on an implicit assumption of unlimited bandwidth and perfect communication environments. However, in practice, wireless communication networks, enabling the cooperative driving applications, introduce unavoidable communication impairments such as transmission delay and packet losses that strongly affect the performances of cooperative driving. Moreover, in addition to this problem, wireless communication networks can suffer different security threats. The challenge in the control field is hence to design cooperative control algorithms that are robust to communication impairments and resilient to cyber attacks. The work aim is to tackle and solve these challenges by proposing different properly designed control strategies. They are validated both in analytical, numerical and experimental ways. Obtained results confirm the effectiveness of the strategies in coping with communication impairments and security vulnerabilities

Enabling Seamless Data Security, Consensus, and Trading in Vehicular Networks

Cooperative driving is an emerging paradigm to enhance the safety and efficiency of autonomous vehicles. To ensure successful cooperation, road users must reach a consensus for making collective decisions, while recording vehicular data to analyze and address failures related to such agreements. This data has the potential to provide valuable insights into various vehicular events, while also potentially improving accountability measures. Furthermore, vehicles may benefit from the ability to negotiate and trade services among themselves, adding value to the cooperative driving framework. However, the majority of proposed systems aiming to ensure data security, consensus, or service trading, lack efficient and thoroughly validated mechanisms that consider the distinctive characteristics of vehicular networks. These limitations are amplified by a dependency on the centralized support provided by the infrastructure. Furthermore, corresponding mechanisms must diligently address security concerns, especially regarding potential malicious or misbehaving nodes, while also considering inherent constraints of the wireless medium. We introduce the Verifiable Event Extension (VEE), an applicational extension designed for Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) messages. The VEE operates seamlessly with any existing standardized vehicular communications protocol, addressing crucial aspects of data security, consensus, and trading with minimal overhead. To achieve this, we employ blockchain techniques, Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) consensus protocols, and cryptocurrency-based mechanics. To assess our proposal's feasibility and lightweight nature, we employed a hardware-in-the-loop setup for analysis. Experimental results demonstrate the viability and efficiency of the VEE extension in overcoming the challenges posed by the distributed and opportunistic nature of wireless vehicular communications

A Distributed Model Predictive Control Framework for Road-Following Formation Control of Car-like Vehicles (Extended Version)

This work presents a novel framework for the formation control of multiple autonomous ground vehicles in an on-road environment. Unique challenges of this problem lie in 1) the design of collision avoidance strategies with obstacles and with other vehicles in a highly structured environment, 2) dynamic reconfiguration of the formation to handle different task specifications. In this paper, we design a local MPC-based tracking controller for each individual vehicle to follow a reference trajectory while satisfying various constraints (kinematics and dynamics, collision avoidance, \textit{etc.}). The reference trajectory of a vehicle is computed from its leader's trajectory, based on a pre-defined formation tree. We use logic rules to organize the collision avoidance behaviors of member vehicles. Moreover, we propose a methodology to safely reconfigure the formation on-the-fly. The proposed framework has been validated using high-fidelity simulations.Comment: Extended version of the conference paper submission on ICARCV'1