The Experience of DRIVERTIVE-DRIVERless cooperaTIve VEhicle-Team in the 2016 GCDC

The second edition of the grand cooperative driving challenge (GCDC2016) was held in The Netherlands in May 2016. Ten international teams participated in the two competition scenarios designed for GCDC2016: platoon merging and intersection. This paper describes the design and development of DRIVERTIVE, a DRIVERless cooperaTIve VEhicle, which aims to advance cooperative automation. The purpose of this paper is to give a general overview of the different designs used to adapt a factory vehicle, with no access to low-level control systems, into a fully-automated cooperative vehicle fit to compete in GCDC2016. The approach taken was pragmatic: different pre-existing techniques for control, state estimation, data fusion, communication, and data degradation were combined and experimentally validated in real-world scenarios, together with other vehicles with different implementations. Our main conclusion is that cooperative autonomous driving is feasible among very different implementations of the communication protocols and using completely different autonomous vehicles.