A Cooperative Car-Following/Emergency Braking System With Prediction-Based Pedestrian Avoidance Capabilities

Urban environments are among the most challenging scenarios for car-following systems, since pedestrians may interfere with the platoon unexpectedly. To address this problem, this paper proposes a cooperative system using vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-pedestrian communication links. A fractional-order control-based cooperative adaptive cruise control benefits of communication for tighter inter-vehicle distances, while pedestrian communication is fused with LiDAR sensing to allow the detection of occluded pedestrians. The prediction of the pedestrians’ trajectories is used to perform a speed reduction or an emergency braking that interrupts the car-following yif necessary. Whenever a platoon decoupling occurs, a gap-closing maneuver is executed so that the ego-vehicle rejoins the platoon in a string stable way. The complete system was tested on experimental platforms at inria facilities, providing encouraging results and demonstrating the correct performance of the integrated systems.