Vehicle Positioning to Connected Vehicles
Funding Source: UTC
Title: Supplementary Vehicle Positioning to Connected Vehicles
Date:
Status: Current
Summary: The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) has recently announced its decision to move on with Connected Vehicle Initiative. This requires future vehicles to be equipped with sensors and communication devices to enable vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-environment communication for improved safety. As large-scale applications of connected vehicles begin to roll out, a serious problem surfaces, i.e., vehicle positioning. Since many of these applications, such as cooperative collision warning and intersection safety supporting, assume accurate vehicle positioning in real time. Unfortunately, Global Positioning System (GPS) technology may not be adequate to serve the purpose. For example, conventional GPS receivers are accurate to 8-12 meters after removal of selective availability. Though differential GPS may narrow accuracy to 1-2 meters, it requires base stations and thus is only available at limited locations. In addition, GPS signals are frequently lost if line-of-sight is blocked and this is typically a problem in urban canyon. Therefore, there exists a present need for alternative vehicle position technology that supplements GPS at locations where position accuracy is critical but GPS service is inadequate or unavailable. This collaborative research proposes to investigate the alternatives and explore a viable solution with high reliability, low cost, and sufficient accuracy under all operational conditions. Additionally, extra work will be conducted on the project in Task 4. Design of the Proposed Vehicle Positioning System. The team will conduct a detailed work on possible combinations of elements in the design and search for one that suits the goal of this project best, and conduct a thorough search for potential technologies and their vendors that can be used to provide supplementary vehicle positioning to connected vehicles.
