AUTOPIA Program Advances: How to automate the traffic?

Abstract

Road transport fatalities are one of the major causes of death in developed countries, so the investigation in aid systems for vehicles to reduce these figures is nowadays an open field of research. With this final goal, AUTOPIA program has been working from 1996 in the development of aid driving systems and, specifically, in autonomous systems capable of replacing the driver in some specific tasks, reducing so, the dependence on the human driver. In this paper we present some of the most relevant advances achieved using commercial vehicles. To achieve this objective, prototype vehicles have been equipped with capabilities to permit it to act over the actuators of the vehicle autonomously. Several cooperative maneuvers have been developed during last years toward a final goal: an intelligent traffic control system.