Seeing Beyond the Line of Site – Controlling Connected Automated Vehicles

This article discusses past, present, and future research on connected automated vehicles and their impact on road transportation. From the 1980s, microcontrollers started to penetrate production vehicles through various subsystems such as engine control units, and anti-lock braking systems. Soon the need for different microcontrollers to communicate with each other led to the invention of the controller area network bus. In the 1990s, onboard sensors were introduced to monitor the environment and the motion of neighboring vehicles. These sensors, combined with more powerful computers, allowed vehicles to perform lateral and longitudinal control such as lane keeping and car following. Starting from the mid-2000s, wireless communication technologies such as WiFi and 4G/LTE have been adopted in order to facilitate vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication. These are often referred to as vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication, where X also includes pedestrians, bicyclists, etc. In particular, in the United States, dedicated short-range communication has been standardized based on IEEE 802.11p protocol, which allows low-latency, ad-hoc, and peer-to-peer communication with 10-Hz update frequency.