Development of a Research Testbed for Cooperative Driving in Mixed Traffic of Human-driven and Autonomous Vehicles

This paper presents a cooperative driving testbed based on vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication, which can be used for research in intelligent transportation systems, such as collision avoidance in mixed traffic of both human-driven vehicles and autonomous vehicles. To achieve the goal, an intelligent copilot is developed. The copilot can share the data regarding vehicle status, intention, etc, with other nearby vehicles through V2V communication. Several case studies are conducted to validate the proposed testbed and evaluate the performances of cooperative driving. When dangerous situations occur, the copilot solves the collision avoidance problem using Mixed Integer Programming (MIP), which either provides control commands to the autonomous vehicle, or advises the human driver to take action. Experimental results show that the safety and stability of the involved vehicles have been significantly enhanced. This cooperative driving testbed can be used by researchers to develop and test cooperative driving algorithms before they are deployed in real vehicles.