MicroIV: A Cooperative Driving Hardware Simulation Platform for Cooperative-ITS

Cooperative-ITS (C-ITS) is a rising innovation that involves the integration of existing intelligent vehicle technology and communication technology, which allows information exchange among components and autonomous cooperative driving among vehicles. Although some hardware platforms are developed for simulation of C-ITS applications, there are still some problems such as lack of global positioning, limited simulation scenarios, and high cost. This paper presents Micro Intelligent Vehicle (MicroIV)-based cooperative driving hardware simulation platform for simulation of C-ITS applications, especially the cooperative maneuvers. Different from existing platforms, cameras installed around the test field are used to capture the motion and global positioning information of micro vehicles, similar to GPS methods. Such system architecture reduces the vehicle's hardware configuration and significantly cuts the cost of the whole system. Then, it is easy to expand the scale of the experiments. Therefore, the proposed platform is flexible for different cooperation scenarios. Point-to-multipoint communication structure with the fixed master node is used to implement the communication between vehicles. Interacting Multiple Model method is leveraged to improve positioning accuracy. Experiments are conducted to prove that the proposed MicroIV platform can meet the positioning accuracy requirement of C-ITS application. Then, applications for both V2V and V2I cooperation are presented: platoon with 20 vehicles, intersection cooperation with 8 vehicles, merging, and automatic parking. These experiments prove the feasibility and reliability of the proposed platform for cooperative driving hardware simulation.