Autonomous cooperative driving using V2X communications in off-road environment

During the last decade, a great deal of attention is received for the idea of designing autonomous vehicles, with intelligent, cooperative and coordinated capabilities to reach an overall optimal performance and robustness. Almost all intelligent vehicles are currently equipped with computing modules, communication modules and multiple sensors for environment perception. Accordingly, it is a matter of utilizing these sensors and modules to enhance and improve the transportation safety and efficiency. In this paper, autonomous cooperative driving using various communications schemes in the off-road environment is presented. Moreover, it highlights the importance of Vehicle-To-Vehicle (V2V) communication and shows the advantages of Vehicle-To-Pedestrian (V2P) and Pedestrian-To-Vehicle (P2V) communications when added to the system environment perception. Several experiments have been performed for real-life scenarios to verify the results, and evaluate the performance of the proposed approach. The experiments outcomes prove the high performance of the proposed approach in real-world application and emphasize the importance of V2X communications in autonomous vehicles.