Safe Automated Driving on Highways – Beyond Today's Connected Autonomous Vehicles

International audienceSafe automated driving rests on safety-critical (SC) inter-vehicular (IV) coordination. Safety criticality is defined unambiguously via the Bounded Move requirements. We show that today's autonomous vehicles and upcoming connected vehicles fail to meet these requirements by huge margins. We present a cyber-physical construct, IV communication protocols and IV agreement algorithms that achieve SC IV coordination in highway autonomic vehicular networks. Worst-case termination time bounds of protocols and algorithms are given, which allows for checking that the Bounded Move requirements are met. These solutions lay the ground for novel standards specifically aimed at safety. Interestingly, they also meet privacy requirements. Some open problems raised with automated driving are put into perspective