For some time we have been dealing with the design and development of cooperative autonomous vehicles. That is, we build vehicles that are not only intelligent in themselves but that can also explicitly cooperate with other autonomous vehicles so that both the individual and shared goals of each vehicle can be expediently achieved. In the road environment this includes the ability to perform driving manoeuvres such as traversal of unsignalised intersections, cooperative overtaking, cooperative formation driving, distance control, stop and go cruise control, intelligent speed adaptation, etc. Responding to the need for a source of motion information, we set out to develop a prototype intelligent sensor. This sensor was to provide timely information about the motion in the environment assuming that all motion occurs on a smooth ground plane. In order to have a compact sensing solution, we decided to implement our sensor using Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology. This, in principle, allowed us to incorporate all processing and interface logic in a single chip the only external devices are memory, power supplies and sensors.

Inspec keywords: cooperative systems; field programmable gate arrays; intelligent sensors; microprocessor chips; mobile robots; motion measurement; vehicles

Other keywords: motion information source; cooperative autonomous vehicle; smooth ground plane; interface logic; FPGA; field programmable gate arrays; intelligent motion measuring sensor

Subjects: Sensing and detecting devices