Towards a Cooperative Robotic Platooning Testbed

The deployment of information and communication technologies in vehicles and into the transportation infrastructure in general, holds the promise of significant improvements to traffic safety and efficiency. The ETSI ITS-G5 standard presents itself as a viable and already available solution, to enable such intelligent social and mobility scenarios in the near future, including cooperative and autonomous vehicle platooning. However, the usage of wireless communications in safety-critical scenarios poses several challenges, and their reliability and safety must be adequately tested and validated. To do this, the safety concerns and cost of relying on real vehicles is prohibitive for early deployments. A solution lies in the use of robotic platforms, since these are relatively cheaper and allow to partially test real platforms and components, as well as different control mechanisms. This work presents the development of a 1/10 scale Cooperative Platooning Robotic Testbed with such aim. Real ITS-G5 On Board Units (OBU) were integrated in the vehicles for communications support and a cooperative control algorithm that solely relies on communications was successfully implemented.