Environment

This paper is a comparative study of the performance of constant-time-gap autonomous control systems and co-operative longitudinal control systems that use inter-vehicle communication. Analytical results show that the minimum time gap that can be achieved in autonomous control is limited by the bandwidth of the internal dynamics of the vehicle. Experimental results from typical sensors and actuators are used to show that in practice it is very difficult to achieve a time gap less than 1 s with autonomous vehicle following. This translates to an inter-vehicle spacing of 30 m at highway...

Urban traffic congestion and air pollution are crucial issues in most metropolitan areas, but are more acute in Southern California than in most other North American regions. The PATH Program at the Institute of Transportation Studies, University of California, Berkeley and the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) have investigated some of the long-term regional impacts that could result from implementation of advanced highway technologies (automation and electrification) in the Los Angeles area. This chapter focuses on the evaluation of mobility impacts of highway...

Cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) vehicle string operations have the potential to improve significantly the mobility and energy consumption performance of congested freeway corridors. This study examines the impact of CACC string operations on vehicle speed and fuel economy on the 13-mi SR-99 corridor, near Sacramento, CA. It extends the existing body of knowledge by performing a multi-scenario simulation analysis of the freeway corridor. A simulation study evaluated the performance of the corridor under various CACC market penetration scenarios and traffic demand inputs. The CACC...

Maps are a good representation of the information state of a network-centric multi-vehicle system that tracks targets. The map service uses information pushed to it by sensors to compute a probabilistic map, i.e., the conditional density of the location of targets given all the past observations. We have designed the map service to be distributed, i.e. the entities participating in the map service divide the probabilistic mapping task amongst themselves, so that it scales well to large operating environments. We present an architecture and algorithms for implementing such a distributed map...