Virtual Coupling: A Cooperative and Collaborative Autonomous Navigation Application
Andreas Trzuskowsky, Matthias M. Wehr, Dirk Abel · Proceedings of the Satellite Division's International Technical Meeting (Online)/Proceedings of the Satellite Division's International Technical Meeting (CD-ROM) · 2016
This paper presents a mobile and highly flexible test platform for developing and validating Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) applications. Therefore a versatile test vehicle, developed at the Institute of Automatic Control at RWTH Aachen University (IRT), referred to as “IRT-Buggy” is introduced. It fills the gap between simulation and full scale experiments. The results shown in this paper are generated in the context of a railway motivated project called Galileo Online: GO!. For the presented application, referred to as “Virtual Coupling” (VC), multiple Buggys cooperate and interchange their position information. The VC aims to realize a convoy of vehicles with the same constant distances between each vehicle even at varying velocities. The convoy shall behave as if the vehicles were mechanically connected to each other. This is done by a virtual connection realized using the GNSS positions of the vehicles, vehicle-to-vehicle communication, and a control center. Experimental results of a selected scenario will be given which validates the presented concept. The example is related to the railway sector, therefore it is necessary that all Buggys follow exactly the same path pretending to be a train on a rail track.