Simulation of automatic vehicle speed control by transponder-equipped infrastructure

A huge amount of research has been done to improve the safety of road environments and reduce the risk of unsafe traffic areas. Initially this research was mainly focused on the perception surrounding a vehicle (local perception with embedded sensors) and its potential reaction on hazardous situation. Since a few years, it has become clear that a local perception is not sufficient. Its extension is essential to minimize risk and maximize the security of the road traffic. To achieve such extension, additional works is required as well as implementation of a lot of devices often very expensive. Therefore, in early design stage, it becomes necessary to have a simulation environment dedicated to prototyping and evaluating these extended and enriched driving assistance systems. For such virtual platform it is mandatory to provide physic-driven road environments, virtual embedded sensors, embedded and virtual communicating devices and physic-base vehicle models. In this publication, we present the prototyping of a speed control application by using beacons put on the road side. The SiVIC simulation platform is used to generate the virtual world (the environment, sensors, beacons, and vehicle). The framework platform RTMaps is used for prototyping the automatic speed control algorithm. The seamless coupling of these platforms allows subsequently embedding the prototyped application directly on a real vehicle.