DEMONSTRATION OF AN AUTONOMOUS CONVOYING CONCEPT

Abstract

In land-based platooning scenarios, follower vehicles must function reliably even when the leader vehicle is no longer in sight. At RedZone Robotics, Inc., the non-line-of-sight leader/follower (NLOSLF) program is investigating the degree to which the integrity of vehicle convoys can be maintained through purely position-based navigation. The NLOSLF scenario involves one or more vehicle(s) that autonomously follow a human-driver leader vehicle that continuously broadcasts its position over radio. The convoy drives both on and off road, at various speeds, and at various inter-vehicle separation distances, not exceeding 200 meters. The accuracy of navigational schemes such as dead-reckoning, global positional system (GPS), and vision-based autonomous road following and their sufficiency to achieve autonomous path tracking for long duration in the presence of intermittent sensory fallouts are examined. The paper further presents future work addressing obstacle detection and avoidance and follower contexts, that switch from non-line-of-sight to line-of-sight when the separation distance drops to 10 meters.