Development of A Platform Technology for Automated Vehicle Research – Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control

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Background

The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) Office of Operations Research and Development, located at Turner-Fairbank Highway Research Center (TFHRC), added five new research vehicles to FHWA’s Innovation Research Vehicle Fleet. This fleet offers an experimental connected automation research platform that provides advanced capabilities for future operational concepts and supports their evaluation. In addition, the fleet’s research platform enables full automatic control of longitudinal movements (such as acceleration and braking) with the flexibility to support lateral control (such as steering controls) for future autonomous vehicle research.

Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) is the first operational implementation developed and tested on the new research platform. CACC allows vehicles to communicate with each other to enable a group of vehicles to implement coordinated advanced applications on freeways and arterials. For example, researchers have leveraged the longitudinal control capabilities provided by the research vehicle platform to deliver speed commands in real-time in order to experiment with speed harmonization. The platform technology also allows the vehicles to use 5.9 GHz Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) and cellular communications to share speed, heading, location, and gap information with each other for advanced applications (such as platooning) in managed lanes.

The CACC implementation will provide the ability to test the open architecture of the vehicle fleet technology platform and assess the ability of researchers to use the vehicle fleet to support the study of operational concepts and connected automation applications.