Simulation, validation and design of cooperative driving systems using PreScan

Sammanfattning: Creating vehicle platoons is a way to reduce congestion, lower fuel consumption and to make roads safer. Making these platoons is possible thanks to inter-vehicle communications, communication between vehicles and infrastructure as well as equipping the vehicles with advanced sensors. In these platoons the vehicles are driven autonomously and the distance between them can be greatly reduced compared to human driving. In November 2012 three teams from the Swedish universities KTH, CTH and LiTH have gathered at Stora Holm, a test track near Göteborg, to demonstrate platooning and to perform a set of predefined maneuvers. Using inter-vehicle communications the teams must be able to autonomously create a gap to the preceding vehicle, close the gap, change reference vehicle during a lane switch as well as other scenarios. The KTH team consists of five full time master thesis students and a few part time PhD-students. The goal of this thesis is to create a simulation environment for platooning, where the team can test their respective parts in an easy fashion and for developing code directly in this environment. The idea is that every team member should be able to copy-paste their work in to this environment without having to make changes to how the system works to see that things are behaving as intended. To create this simulation environment PreScan has been used. PreScan is designed to be a development environment for intelligent transport systems. During this thesis it has proven to be a good platform to both recreate the Stora Holm track used for the demonstration and to try controlling strategies, logic, different algorithms for sorting and other parts of the project. The PreScan environment has not been implemented with any hardware-in-the-loop simulation but for the software many parts after the WIFI communications have been thoroughly tested before it was implemented in the real trucks.