Development of braking systems for platoon-driving — Development of energy-saving ITS technologies

Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) issued a report titled "Next-Generation Vehicle and Fuel Initiative." In the report, METI laid out the idea of Japan pursuing efforts to become the world's most environmentally friendly motorized society as one measure of the initiative, and proposed building a low-carbon emission economy based on intelligent transport systems (ITS). Technology for platoon driving, in which vehicles form a convoy to travel as a unit, will be developed to realize a highly efficient arterial traffic distribution system. This technology, which includes reducing aerodynamic drag by minimizing the distance between vehicles to allow drafting, will promote energy-efficient driving. The target is to ultimately achieve a inter-vehicle distance of 4 [m] by March 2013. In light of this target spacing, it is very important to maintain the safety of drivers during platoon driving. (The target gap was set at 10 [m] for 2010.) In this paper, we report the concept, system configuration, and driver safety provided by the proposed new braking system.