A unified architecture for scalable and replicable autonomous shuttles in a smart city

Connected and automated driving vehicles have become a present and near future reality. There are already a slowly increasing number of trucks that do autonomous test drives on highways. Level 3 Highway Chauffeur applications are expected to be on the market as early as 2020 and Level 4 Highway Pilot applications are expected to be available around 2025. There is also a drive towards smarter cities with smarter mobility choices that include the use of smaller, lower speed automated driving vehicles. This paper proposes a unified basic computing, sensing, communication and actuation architecture and scalable and replicable automated driving control systems built upon that architecture. A passenger sedan and a small electric vehicle are used to illustrate the application of the proposed unified architecture to these two different sized vehicles. Their automation along with a scalable control algorithm for path following are used for presenting the scalability and replicability of the unified architecture proposed in this paper.