Developing autonomous maneuvering capabilities for future cars

Developing intelligent transportation systems which take into consideration the socio-economical, environmental, and safety factors of the modern society, is one of the grand challenges of the next century. Progress in the fields of mobile robots, control architectures, and computer vision allows us to now envisage the integration of autonomous and driving-assistance capabilities within future vehicles. The paper presents the concept of the "automated urban vehicle" which is currently developed within the scope of the French "Praxitele" and "automated road" programmes. It focuses on the control and decisional architecture which has been developed for providing each vehicle with the required autonomous capabilities. Experimental results obtained with our automatic electric vehicles are presented for three types of manoeuvres: lane following/changing, parallel parking, and platooning.