Adapting the Virtual Platooning Concept to Roundabout Crossing

Despite the tremendous growth of research regarding fully autonomous vehicles in the past few years, many safety critical scenarios, such as the crossing of roundabouts, are still open issues. One of the main challenge is to deal with the lack of visibility in complex environments. Vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications offer an appealing solution to handle these situations in a cooperative way. To avoid computing an ad hoc control strategy for every possible scenario, we propose in this paper to adapt the concept of virtual platooning to roundabout crossing. This idea allows a single platooning control law to handle complex scenarios such as intersection and roundabout crossings. This work combines the use of high definition maps and a curvilinear coordinates framework to deal with any kind of roundabouts. The proposed approach is not limited to communicating autonomous vehicles but can also be used with manually driven communicating vehicles or non-communicating vehicles with the help on the infrastructure. A formal proof of the correctness of this approach is given and simulations have been carried out with a high definition map of a real roundabout. We also introduce a novel graphical representation called safety diagram to study de performances of our approach.