Automated urban vehicles: towards a dual mode PRT (Personal Rapid Transit)

The concept of public individual transport is now gaining recognition in several countries, thanks to the development of reliable electric vehicles. A type of electric vehicle is needed which can solve the problem of moving empty vehicles. The vehicle has to move by itself and hence use robotics techniques. This paper presents such a vehicle under development at INRIA and focusses on a vision technique for platoon driving of homogeneous cars supervised by a central computer. The public cars are driven by their users but their operation is automated in some instances when no-one is on board. For later versions, fully automated driving (with passengers) is considered on dedicated tracks and on low-traffic road networks at slower speed. The paper focusses on the vision and control techniques now developed for the first version. We wish to be able to drive a train of empty public cars with only one driver. Trains can be up to 6 cars long and the distance between cars will vary between 0 and 5 m. Real size experiments are in the planning stage with potential application in 1997. This project is named PRAXITELE