System Architecture of a Driverless Electric Car in the Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge

This paper presents the complete system architecture of a connected driverless electric car designed to participate in the Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge 2016. One of the main goals of this challenge was to demonstrate the feasibility of multiple autonomous vehicles cooperating via wireless communications on public roads. Several complex cooperative scenarios were considered, including the merging of two lanes and cooperation at an intersection. We describe in some detail an implementation using the open-source PACPUS framework that successfully completed the different tasks in the challenge. Our description covers localization, mapping, perception, control, communication and the human-machine interface. Some experimental results recorded in real-time during the challenge are reported.