Cooperative driving of automated vehicles with inter-vehicle communications

This paper deals with cooperative driving of automated vehicles on highways with data transmission based on inter-vehicle communications. It presents a data transmission algorithm in a platoon for a unidirectional medium and an omni-directional one under both a steady state and a transient state. The algorithm features a larger throughput rate than the conventional system, when the number of vehicles in a platoon is less than 15. This paper also focuses on the merging issue, which is a typical case of cooperative driving, and presents a merging control algorithm that makes the best use of inter-vehicle communications. Results of the simulation study and indoor experiment show the feasibility of the algorithms of data transmission and merging control