Implementation of Inter-vehicle Communication System and Experiments of Longitudinal Vehicle Platoon Control via a Testbed

This study considers the implementation issues of the inter-vehicle communication system for the vehicle platoon experiments via a testbed. The testbed, which consists of three scale vehicles and one RCS(remote control station), is developed as a tool for functions evaluation between simulation studies and full-sized vehicle researches in the previous study. The cooperative communication of the vehicle-to-vehicle or the vehicle-to-roadside plays a key role for keeping the relative spacing of vehicles small in a vehicle platoon. The static platoon control, where the number of vehicles remains constant, is sufficient for the information to be transmitted in the suitably fixed interval, while the dynamic platoon control such as merge or split requires more flexible network architecture for the dynamical coordination of the communication sequence. In this study, the wireless communication device and the reliable protocol of the flexible network architecture are implemented for our testbed, using the low-cost, ISM band transceiver and the 8-bit microcontroller.