Abstract
For several years, autonomous intelligent cruise control (AICC) systems as well as anti-collision radars have been developed. Several manufacturers currently sell these equipments. This generation of sensor only tracks the first preceding vehicle to deduce its speed and position. These data are used to manage and optimize a safety distan-ce between vehicles thus, providing some assistance to the car drivers.
However, within a platoon, in order to elaborate and update a real time driving solution, car drivers use information about the speed and position of preceding and following vehicles. This information is essentially perceived through the driver's eyes through the windscreen and the rear-view mirror.
Predictive Cruise Control (PCC) is now considered by the industry to develop a next generation of AICC sensor. It will include a road information description stored into an on-board database. Thus, PCC driver assistance system will merge dynamic information, the basic speed/distance of the preceding vehicle and, stored information, extracted from the database. This database could include road characteristics like bends, slippery slopes PCC equipments necessitate a self-localization sensor such as a GNSS (GPS, GALILEO ) receiver to compute the accurate vehicle position. This position is used to extract the relevant incoming road characteristics.
Furthermore, within a platoon, the frontal road perception of the first vehicle is very particular and highly significant.
Currently, all this available data remains strictly on-board the vehicle that has performed the measurement or captured the frontal perception information.
To get the maximum effectiveness of all these approaches, we propose that this information be real time shared with the following vehicles within a platoon. This new system has been tentatively named the electronic pre-view mirror (EPVM). Based on these considerations, this paper technically explores a cost effective solution to simultaneously use an AICC sensor to track vehicles and to transmit relevant broadband data (video ) to the following vehicles along the platoon. Other communication medias like IEEE 802.11x, Hiperlan 2 and Ultra Wide Band (UWB) are also investigated to perform this vehicle-to-vehicle communication link.