Introduction

Upcoming vehicles will be intelligent and autonomous with benefits on efficiency and safety of road networks and new mobility services never imagined before. Sensors can fail in case of adverse weather conditions such as fog or rain. Increasing the number of sensors and their quality leads to increased costs and not necessarily increased system reliability. The proposed method provides a high throughput and high-reliability data exchange exploiting dynamically two communication interfaces, the main one at high frequency (220) and the lower frequency as supporting interface (230).

Technical features

A wide range of environmental sensors are used in autonomous driving. However, they may not meet the required safety standards. The proposed method is designed to overcome all reported weaknesses. Unlike known approaches, it describes a proactive system in which a first agent (vehicle, roadside unit or network entity) requests and directly accesses one or more sensors of a second agent, where at least one of the two agents is mobile. The first agent requests the list of available sensors and their addresses. The second agent receives the request from the first agent, creates a virtual port for each available sensor, and associates a virtual address with each virtual port. The virtual ports will duplicate the raw data of the associated physical sensors, thus acting as virtual sensors. The second agent sends the list with the available sensors and their virtual addresses to the first agent. Finally, the first agent can establish a virtual database directly with the virtual sensor through this virtual address.

Possible Applications

• Automotive sector;
• Future mobility;
• Autonomous vehicles.

Advantages

• Limited participation of the cooperating agent (second vehicle) in the decision process;
• The operations in charge of the cooperating agent are limited to establishing the virtual data bus once the request is received, after which it continues to autonomously use its sensors and resources for all the internal procedures of the autonomous guidance system.