A Novel RF (XBee) and IR LoS (Line-of-Sight) Collaborative Vehicle-to-Vehicle Navigation Technique

Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication has been under heavy development in the last decade. Most modern automobiles have a multitude of safety features and sensors that aid in the protection of the driver, however, most vehicles have no method or means to communicate with one another. With the recent advances in light communication, via Light-Fidelity (LiFi), and the widespread use of LED lighting in many consumer products, including automobiles, the possibility of this medium being used for effective V2V communications has increased. This paper presents a novel radio frequency (RF) and Infrared Line-of-Sight (IR-LoS) collaborative Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication technique than enables time critical information to be distributed to each neighboring vehicle. To simulate this setup, a National Instruments (NI) DaNI 2.0 Robotic platform (programmed with LabView) simulated a full size vehicle. It was equipped with an IR send and receive pair, as well as, an XBee Series 2 module. A novel IR packet was developed and deployed to send the leading vehicle's left and right motor speeds, along with the distance values from the on board forward facing ultrasonic sensor. The trailing vehicle would receive this information and make intelligent decisions based on this data. Both mediums transmitted the same three parameters to ensure a communication link was constantly established between the vehicles. Various driving scenarios were used to test the various active braking and forward collision avoidance scenarios. The hardware and software solutions of this method and results of these test are presented in this paper.