The Development of a Cooperative Heavy-Duty Vehicle for the GCDC 2011: Team Scoop

The first edition of the Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge (GCDC) was held in the Netherlands in May 2011. Nine international teams competed in urban and highway platooning scenarios with prototype vehicles using cooperative adaptive cruise control. Team Scoop, a collaboration between KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, and Scania CV AB, Södertälje, Sweden, participated at the GCDC with a Scania R-series tractor unit. This paper describes the development and design of Team Scoop's prototype system for the GCDC. In particular, we present considerations with regard to the system architecture, state estimation and sensor fusion, and the design and implementation of control algorithms, as well as implementation issues with regard to the wireless communication. The purpose of the paper is to give a broad overview of the different components that are needed to develop a cooperative driving system: from architectural design, workflow, and functional requirement descriptions to the specific implementation of algorithms for state estimation and control. The approach is more pragmatic than scientific; it collects a number of existing technologies and gives an implementation-oriented view of a cooperative vehicle. The main conclusion is that it is possible, with a modest effort, to design and implement a system that can function well in cooperation with other vehicles in realistic traffic scenarios.