Autonomous vehicle control systems for safe crossroads

This article presents a cooperative manoeuvre among three dual mode cars - vehicles equipped with sensors and actuators, and that can be driven either manually or autonomously. One vehicle is driven autonomously and the other two are driven manually. The main objective is to test two decision algorithms for priority conflict resolution at intersections so that a vehicle autonomously driven can take their own decision about crossing an intersection mingling with manually driven cars without the need for infrastructure modifications. To do this, the system needs the position, speeds, and turning intentions of the rest of the cars involved in the manoeuvre. This information is acquired via communications, but other methods are also viable, such as artificial vision. The idea of the experiments was to adjust the speed of the manually driven vehicles to force a situation where all three vehicles arrive at an intersection at the same time.The authors express their gratitude to the TRANSITO (TRA2008-06602- C03-01) Project of the Plan Nacional, GUIADE (P9/08) Project of the Ministerio de Fomento, and to the MARTA Project (CENIT-20072006)