Automated Vehicles: Autonomous or Connected?

Summary form only given. Fully automated vehicles have been a research topic for more than 30 years. In 1994, the Prometheus European project ended 8 years of research with demonstration of fully autonomous driving on the A1 highway near Paris. In 2005 the DARPA Challenge ended with 4 vehicles running fully autonomously over an off-road course of more than 100km and in 2007, the DARPA Urban Challenge presented several autonomous vehicles operating simultaneously with other manually driven vehicles in an urban environment. More recently and based essentially on the expertise of the best DARPA teams, Google demonstrated several autonomous vehicles that were driven several thousands of miles in California and Nevada, forcing these states (and Florida) to pass legislation concerning the operation of autonomous vehicles on public roads. In 2010, a team from Parma University demonstrated 2 automated vehicles driving in tandem from Italy to China. These concepts of "autonomous" (meaning without communication with other vehicles or infrastructure) vehicles will soon appear on the market if the legislative barriers concerning the safety can be lifted. However, this approach does not seem to bring much improvements in terms of road capacity as long as the automatic vehicles are autonomous and share the road space with non-cooperative vehicles. However, automated vehicles do not need to be autonomous in the sense that they can be connected. Through communication, automated vehicles can become much more efficient, for example by implementing platoon operation as in the Chauffeur or Sartre European projects or the AHS Project in the USA that ended in 1997 with a demonstration of 8 fully automated vehicles driving in a platoon on a highway in San Diego. Automatic vehicles can also cooperate with the infrastructure to improve the flow of traffic by variable speed limits or intersection management. Through communications, automated and regular vehicles can also cooperate to improv- safety and efficiency. Finally, cooperative automatic vehicles can form a very efficient transport system in the case of cybercars: a public transport system in dedicated areas such as those operating at Heathrow airport or Masdar, the eco-city of Abu-Dhabi. The European project CityMobil-2 is now preparing large scale demonstrations of such cooperative vehicles in five cities.