Visible Light Communication based Vehicle Localization for Collision Avoidance and Platooning

Abstract

Collision avoidance and platooning applications require vehicle localization at cm-level accuracy and at least 50 Hz rate for full autonomy. The RADAR/LIDAR and camera based methods currently used for vehicle localization do not satisfy these requirements, necessitating complementary technologies. Visible light positioning (VLP) is a highly suitable complementary technology due to its high accuracy and high rate, exploiting the line-of-sight propagation feature of the visible light communication (VLC) signals from LED head/tail lights. However, existing vehicular VLP algorithms impose restrictive requirements, e.g., use of high-bandwidth circuits, road-side lights and certain VLC modulation strategies, and work for limited relative vehicle orientations, thus, are not feasible for general use. This paper proposes a VLC-based vehicle localization method that eliminates these restrictive requirements by a novel VLC receiver design and associated vehicular VLP algorithm. The VLC receiver, named QRX, is low-cost/size, and enables high-rate VLC and high-accuracy angle-of-arrival (AoA) measurement, simultaneously, via the usage of a quadrant photodiode. The VLP algorithm estimates the positions of two head/tail light VLC transmitters (TX) on a neighbouring vehicle by using AoA measurements from two QRXs for localization. The algorithm is theoretically analyzed by deriving its Cramer-Rao lower bound on positioning accuracy, and simulated localization performance is evaluated under realistic platooning and collision avoidance scenarios. Results demonstrate that the proposed method performs at cm-level accuracy and up to 250 Hz rate within a 10 m range under realistic harsh road and channel conditions, demonstrating its eligibility for collision avoidance and safe platooning.

arXiv comment14 pages, 12 figures, accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology