Experimental Testing of Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control using Small Electric Vehicles

This paper reports on development of Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) algorithm for small Electric Vehicles (EVs), and on evaluation of the algorithm using the small EVs. In order to enhance availability of vehicles’ autonomous driving systems, both ride comfortable which depends on longitudinal control, and maintaining vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) distance are essential. CACC is researched and developed to solve the technological issues. Generally, in obtaining state quantities of the preceding vehicle, the method which receive internal sensors of the preceding vehicle via V2V communication can acquire more accurate information than the method which obtains the information with external sensors of the vehicle. CACC is a kind of ACC which uses state quantities of the preceding vehicle obtained via V2V communication, thus CACC is capable for coexistence of the two points; ride comfortable and maintaining V2V distance. On the other hand, knowledge on evaluation of the points using actual vehicles has not enough stacked yet. This study therefore develops CACC for small EVs and accomplishes evaluation using several vehicles. In this paper, backgrounds surrounding driving assistant systems, such as CACC, are explained at first. Next, related works on the CACC focused on this study are introduced and their technological issues are clarified. CACC algorithm for evaluation using small EVs is then reported. Finally, experimental evaluation using three small EVs which performs the CACC algorithm developed in this study is explained. This evaluation certificates CACC’s capability of ensuring both ride comfortable and string stability.