A platoon of vehicles approaching an intersection: A testing platform for safe intersections

Intersections are one of the most complex driving scenarios for an autonomous vehicle. When a platoon of autonomous vehicles following a leader approaches the intersection, the platoon should change its highway mode to other modes in order to cross the intersection safely. Therefore, the position, velocity and acceleration of the vehicles inside the platoon should be available. Furthermore, information about the position and velocity of other vehicles in the intersection area should be known too. The platoon controller should use all these information to decide which mode will be adopted. In fact, the platoon has to decide whether to stop, to pass or to split the platoon while crossing the intersection. This paper proposes a scaled testing platform of four electronically coupled vehicles equipped with a positioning system and an intersection management system. We tested different scenarios related to different crossing modes of the platoon. The experiments showed that we can change the platoon mode from a highway mode to an intersection drive efficiently.