Multilayer distributed intelligent control of an autonomous car

This paper shows how the development of an intelligent vehicle application can benefit from using standard mobile robotics elements in general, and a development framework in particular. This framework, ThinkingCap-II, has been successfully used in other robotics applications. It consists of a series of modules and services that have been developed in Java and allows the distribution of these modules over a network. The framework facilitates reusing components and concepts from other developments, which permits increasing the performance of the intelligent vehicle development. This fact is especially useful for small research groups. A two car convoy application has been implemented using this architecture and the development of an autonomous vehicle. Both the ThinkingCap-II and the autonomous vehicle architectures are described in detail. Finally some experiments are presented. Simulated experiments are used to validate the convoy model, testing the activation of the different behaviors in the decision-making process. Real experiments show the actual working of the developed intelligent vehicle application. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.