Crossroad Cooperative Driving Based on GPS and Wireless Communications

Autonomous vehicles have the capacity of circulating much in the way humans drive them, but without the inherent limitations of people driving. A second step in the development of these kind of vehicles is to add the capacity to perform cooperative driving with other cars to them, autonomously as well manually driven. The aim of this paper is to describe a new kind maneuvers for autonomous vehicles: intersection dealing capability. In our work with autonomous vehicles, we have developed an automatic driving system based on artificial intelligence, with the ability to perform automatic driving in stand-alone routes as well a limited cooperative driving, with some maneuvers controlled: Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) and overtaking. In this paper, we develop an extension of the cooperative driving system, adding the capacity to deal with road intersections to the cybernetic driver. We have defined a set of cases of use and we have implemented a first prototype of the simplest one, that is the crossing of a priority road. Some experiments have been carried out, using our mass produced autonomous vehicles, equipped with onboard computers, GPS receivers and wireless networking.