AutoMCM: Maneuver Coordination Service with Abstracted Functions for Autonomous Driving

TL;DR

AutoMCM introduces a maneuver coordination protocol for autonomous vehicles that enhances safety and efficiency by reducing communication bandwidth and improving vehicle speed, demonstrating robustness and practical benefits in V2X-enabled systems.

Contribution

This paper presents a novel maneuver coordination protocol with an abstracted support service, integrated into existing autonomous driving and V2X software tools, improving communication efficiency and vehicle performance.

Findings

Reduces communication bandwidth through event-driven message exchange.

Vehicles are 15% faster at 30 km/h and 28% faster at 50 km/h with AutoMCM.

System remains robust against packet loss with proper timeout settings.

Abstract

A cooperative intelligent transport system (C-ITS) uses vehicle-to-everything (V2X) technology to make self-driving vehicles safer and more efficient. Current C-ITS applications have mainly focused on real-time information sharing, such as for cooperative perception. In addition to better real-time perception, self-driving vehicles need to achieve higher safety and efficiency by coordinating action plans. This study designs a maneuver coordination (MC) protocol that uses seven messages to cover various scenarios and an abstracted MC support service. We implement our proposal as AutoMCM by extending two open-source software tools: Autoware for autonomous driving and OpenC2X for C-ITS. The results show that our system effectively reduces the communication bandwidth by limiting message exchange in an event-driven manner. Furthermore, it shows that the vehicles run 15% faster when the vehicle speed is 30 km/h and 28% faster when the vehicle speed is 50 km/h using our scheme. Our system shows robustness against packet loss in experiments when the message timeout parameters are appropriately set.