Autonomous & Connected Vehicles

Group Leader: Carl Crane, Ph.D.

Carl D. Crane, Ph.D., is a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Director of the Center for Intelligent Machines and Robotics (CIMAR) at the University of Florida. Crane has been involved in research spanning over 25 years in the areas of spatial mechanisms, tensegrity systems, robotics, and autonomous navigation. Current activities include the development and implementation of system architectures for autonomous ground vehicle navigation, as well as the design and implementation of passive parallel mechanisms for force control applications. Crane was the team leader of the University of Florida’s 2004 and 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge autonomous vehicle development efforts and the University of Florida’s 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge project team.

Information

Connected vehicles (CV) use various communication technologies to exchange information with other cars on the road (vehicle-to-vehicle [V2V]), roadside infrastructure (vehicle-to-infrastructure [V2I]), and the “Cloud” [V2C]. Autonomous, or “self-driving” vehicles are defined by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) as “those in which operation of the vehicle occurs without direct driver input to control the steering, acceleration, and braking and are designed so that the driver is not expected to constantly monitor the roadway while operating in self-driving mode.”  Connected and/or Autonomous Vehicle (CV/AV/CAV) technologies are among the most attractive automotive technologies, and they  continue to evolve and rapidly develop new capabilities.  It is widely believed that CV/AV/CAV have great potential to not only improve vehicle safety, but also to improve traffic mobility, efficiency and sustainability. The UFTI is  a leader in this area, both with respect to technology development as well as traffic management. It has competed nationally in events such as the DARPA Urban Challenge and is still actively conducting related research.

Related on-going research projects include but are not limited to the following list.

Projects

Title	Principal Investigator	Agency/Source	Project Number
LiDAR Sensor (Future Data Collection Progress)	Carl Crane, III, Ph.D.	FDOT	BDV31 977-57
Traffic Signal Control with Connected and Autonomous Vehicles in the Traffic Stream For updated information visit the AVIAN website here: [link]	Lily Elefteriadou, Ph.D.	NSF	NSF G000170
Development and Testing of Optimized Autonomous and Connected Vehicle Trajectories at Signalized Intersections	Lily Elefteriadou, Ph.D.	FDOT	BDV31-977-45
Policy Implications of Automated Vehicle Technology	Siva Srinivasan, Ph.D.	FDOT	BDV32-977-06
Collaborative Research: Coordinated Real-Time Traffic Management Based on Dynamic Information Propagation and Aggregation under Connected Vehicle Systems	Lili Du, Ph.D.	NSF	NSF 1436786 or 1817346
CAREER: Integrated Online Coordinated Routing and Decentralized Control for Connected Vehicle Systems	Lili Du, Ph.D.	NSF	NSF 1554559 or 1818526

More projects can be found on the TRID database at https://trid.trb.org/

Participants