An Architecture for Experiments in Connected and Automated Vehicles

Abstract

Rapid prototyping of Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAV) is challenging because of the physical distribution of vehicles. Furthermore, experiments with CAV may be subject to external influences which prevent reproducibility. This article presents an architecture for the experimental testing of CAVs, focusing on decision-making. Our architecture for experiments of CAV is strictly modular and hierarchical, and therefore it supports an easy and rapid exchange of every single controller as well as of optimization libraries. Additionally, the architecture synchronizes the whole network of sensors, computation devices, and actuators. Thus, it achieves deterministic and reproducible results, even for timevariant network topologies. Using this architecture, we can include active and passive vehicles and vehicles with heterogeneous dynamics in the experiments. The architecture also allows for handling communication uncertainties, e.g., data packet drop and time delay. The resulting architecture supports performing different in-the-loop tests and experiments. We demonstrate the architecture in the Cyber-Physical Mobility Lab (CPM Lab) using 20 vehicles on a 1:18 scale. The architecture can be applied to other domains.

Addressing Rare Outages in C-V2X With Time-Controlled One-Shot Resource Scheduling

“…Thus, those VUEs will get into a cycle of half duplex loss, until either of them changes their resource through SPS. A simple approxima-tion for such a half-duplex loss at any distance nearer than 𝑟 can be obtained by splitting the Poisson process theorized so far with a probability of 1 𝑃 𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑝 and using Equation (7) for finding the nearest 𝑘 = 1 neighbor.…”

“…While this approach is very effective containing the unbounded nature of IA, it removes the predictability of transmission and thus reducing the performance of SPS. In another study, [7] authors proposed a double allocation of resources in an alternating fashion. But, the HARQ procedure already serves a similar role, and fails to ensure enough robustness.…”

“…But, as a distributed ad-hoc network, C-V2X Mode-4 cannot detect and avoid a collision before or during it happens. Hence, it must follow a distributed control architecture [7], where decision of transmission is based on measurement, estimation, and control input for each vehicle . Due to the probabilistic nature of this method, a rare but unique phenomenon of communication outage between nodes happens.…”