Development of braking systems for platoon-driving — Development of energy-saving ITS technologies

Japan\´s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) issued a report titled "Next-Generation Vehicle and Fuel Initiative." In the report, METI laid out the idea of Japan pursuing efforts to become the world\´s most environmentally friendly motorized society as one measure of the initiative, and proposed building a low-carbon emission economy based on intelligent transport systems (ITS). Technology for platoon driving, in which vehicles form a convoy to travel as a unit, will be developed to realize a highly efficient arterial traffic distribution system. This technology, which includes reducing aerodynamic drag by minimizing the distance between vehicles to allow drafting, will promote energy-efficient driving. The target is to ultimately achieve a inter-vehicle distance of 4 [m] by March 2013. In light of this target spacing, it is very important to maintain the safety of drivers during platoon driving. (The target gap was set at 10 [m] for 2010.) In this paper, we report the concept, system configuration, and driver safety provided by the proposed new braking system.