Platooning as a service of autonomous vehicles

Smart vehicles equipped with computers and wireless communication devices are emerging on the road. These vehicles can drive themselves, communicate to other vehicles, connect to the Internet, and provide value-added services to the drivers and passengers. With the advent of such technology, it is possible to form a "platoon" of autonomous vehicles on the road, where they follow a common leader vehicle in the same lane on the highway and maintain close proximity to save fuel, improve road capacity and passenger comfort. However, realizing such vision faces difficulties on both software architecture and vehicle control. In this paper, we propose a service-oriented perspective for the software modules on the autonomous vehicles, where platooning is designed as an independent service interacting with other components of the vehicle. We also built a prototype system with low cost vehicle-like mobile robots and ran experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our service framework and our platooning control algorithm. Our hope is that the platooning as a service approach can help in the construction of more efficient, interoperable, and secure autonomous vehicles in the future.