The Use of Lane-Centering to Ensure the Visible Light Communication Connectivity for a Platoon of Autonomous Vehicles

The new emerging Visible Light Communication (VLC) technology has been subjected to intensive investigation, evaluation, and lately, deployed in the context of convoy-based applications for Intelligent Transportations Systems (ITS). The technology limitations were defined and supported by different solution proposals to enhance the crucial alignment and mobility limitations. In this paper, we propose to incorporate VLC technology and the Lane-Centering (LC) technique to ensure the VLC-connectivity by keeping the autonomous vehicle aligned to the lane center using vision-based lane detection in a convoy-based formation. As soon as the road lanes are detectable, the evaluated system showed stable behavior independently of the inter-vehicle distances and without the need to exchange information between vehicles. Such a combination can ensure the optical communication connectivity with a lateral error of less than 30 cm. The evaluation of the proposed system is verified using VLC prototype and an empirical result of an LC active application over 60 km on the Madrid M40 highway. Keywords: VLC, Lane-Centering, Platoon, ITS, Road safety applications.