Vehicle Platooning using Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication

Abstract

This report describes the vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication system. The project vision is to develop and integrate a technology that enables vehicles to drive in platoon as a collection of vehicles where a manually driven lead vehicle is followed by many automatically controlled following cars. The V2V communication system enables forwarding of messages between vehicles to share data such as vehicle speed and position. In this report, I will present a prototype of vehicle platoon using V2V communication system. The project consists of a leader vehicle and one follower vehicle. Leader vehicle is controlled by user using a smartphone or controlled web server. Both vehicles are connected through a wireless network through ESP8266 module. Wireless networks will allow communication between both vehicles and data exchange such as speed of vehicles, direction, and separation distance between vehicles. The main functions and algorithms of the proposed platooning system are achieved based on wireless communication, while the system is implemented based on a microcontroller board. It is shown that by applying V2V communication, platooning can be used in many aspects of automation in which two different vehicles can be replaced with one master and all other vehicles as followers to maintain synchronization between vehicles using a wireless network. Platoon formations will improve the travel time, congestion by increasing lane capacity and it also have environmental benefits.