DS0604 - Réseaux et services efficients

Automatic redistribution of a fleet of car-sharing vehicles and parking valet – VALET

VALET

Objective: Realization of an automatic redistribution system for shared vehicles; And Parking Valet Target markets: Car sharing operators, rental cars, automatic taxis; Parking and recharging center operators, shopping malls, etc. Technical / regulatory background: technical maturity but classic regulatory issue related to the driverless vehicle Trend: current and current topics, needs and demands identified, important market in sight.

Automatic redistribution of co-sharing vehicles and realization of a parking Valet

The announced objective of the project is the development of an automatic redistribution system for sharing vehicles in an urban environment. The principle is based on the construction of automated vehicle platoons guided by manually driven vehicles. The collected vehicles are transported to a charging center or to a parking lot; Here, each vehicle is assigned a parking place to which it must head and then to which it must park entirely autonomously. Throughout the movement of platoons and vehicles, they must interact with other road users, including vehicle-like obstacles as well as pedestrians. Societal and environmental impacts: Increased smart and sustainable mobility Encourage and find a viable solution to the problem of recharging Reducing parking time: saving time, environmental cost Economic Benefits New markets, new applications Several operators concerned: managers of car-sharing vehicles, rental vehicles, parking and charging centers, cargo, shopping centers, ...

This system is composed of four distinct subsystems: 1. A system of optimum determination and management of the platoons (number of platoons, number of vehicles per platoon, route of each platoon, etc.) according to a multi-criteria optimization; 2. Formation of urban platoons/convoys with autonomous cooperative vehicles based on on-board sensors and V2V and V2I wireless telecommunications devices; 3. An automated parking valet system whereby each self-driven conveyed vehicle is expected to move and park autonomously in a place assigned to it by the system automatically; 4. Each of the three previous subsystems has a management and control interface which interacts with both the human driver of the leading vehicle and the management and control servers. This system is composed of four distinct subsystems: 1. A system of optimum determination and management of the platoons (number of platoons, number of vehicles per platoon, route of each platoon, etc.) according to a multi-criteria optimization; 2. Formation of urban squads with autonomous cooperative vehicles based on on-board sensors and V2V and V2I wireless telecommunications devices; 3. An automated parking valet system whereby each self-propelled vehicle conveyed is expected to move and stand autonomously in a place assigned to it by the system automatically; 4. Each of the three previous subsystems has a management and control interface which interacts with both the human driver of the leading vehicle and the management and control servers.

1. Major scientific and technical advances 2. Realization of three distinct commercially exploitable systems - Vehicle fleet management system for sharing or leasing, or automated taxis - Automatic Parking Valet Parking System - Automated platooning system, suitable for use in urban and motorway environments 3. Realization of dedicated HMI interfaces 4. Real demonstrators using real prototypes.

The modularity of the systems developed in VALET makes it possible to envisage the commercial exploitation of several systems by several types of operators or operators: - Valet parking system - Platooning system - Fleet management system At the end of the project - and even during the lifetime of the project - we plan to approach potential operators. At a minimum, we consider validating the approaches and systems under real conditions and / or on real sites.

1. P. Vasishta, D. Vaudreydaz, A. Spalanzani, « Natural Vision Based Method for Predicting Pedestrian Behaviour in Urban Environments”, ITSC’17, Japan oct 2017. 2. Carlos Flores, Vicente Milanés, Fawzi Nashashibi. «A Time Gap-Based Spacing Policy for Full-Range Car-Following«. IEEE ITSC, Japan, oct 2017 3. Carlos Flores, Vicente Milanés, Fawzi Nashashibi. «Using Fractional Calculus for Cooperative Car-Following Control«. IEEE ITSC, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, November 2016. 4. Fernando Garrido, David Gonzalez Bautista, Vicente Milanés, Joshué Pérez, Fawzi Nashashibi. « Real-time Planning for Adjacent Consecutive Intersections ». ITSC, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, November 2016 5. Francisco Navas, Vicente Milanés and Fawzi Nashashibi. «Youla-Kucera Based Online Closed-Loop Identification for Longitudinal Vehicle Dynamics«. ICSTCC Conference, Romania 2017 6. Zayed Alsayed, Guillaume Bresson, Fawzi Nashashibi, Anne Verroust-Blondet. “PML-SLAM: a solution for localization in large-scale urban environments”. In the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), October 2015. 7. D. Perez Morales, S. Dominguez Quijada, O. Kermorgant, P. Martinet, “ Autonomous parking using a sensor based approach”, 8th Workshop on Planning, Perception and Navigation for Intelligent Vehicles, PPNIV'16, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil November 1st, pp. 211-216, 2016 8. D. Perez Morales, O. Kermorgant, S. Dominguez Quijada, P. Martinet, “ Autonomous Perpendicular And Parallel Parking Using Multi-Sensor Based Control”, 9th Workshop on Planning, Perception and Navigation for Intelligent Vehicles, IROS17-PPNIV'17, Vancouver, Canada, September 24th, 2017. Submitted publications: 1. Carlos Flores, Pierre Merdrignac, Raoul de Charette, Francisco Navas, Vicente Milanés and Fawzi Nashashibi. ”A Cooperative Car-Following/Emergency Braking System With Prediction-based Pedestrian Avoidance Capabilities”. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, June 2017.


Shared transportation systems in urban environments are the current trend to improve transportation problems toward eco-friendly cities. As an example, Vélib bike sharing system in Paris allows users to have bikes available all around the city. However, the associate problem of these transportation systems is mainly related to the relocation strategies in order to always have availability in all the stations. Specifically for Vélib, operators manually displace more than 3000 bikes daily using trucks, corresponding to 3% of the total fleet motion.

For car-sharing systems, relocation strategies require more sophisticated techniques for their implementation on cities. As automatic relocation cannot be achieved for legal reasons, an alternative is to get a leader vehicle, driven by a human, which comes to pick up and drop off vehicles over the stations. The VALET project proposes a novel approach for solving car-sharing vehicles redistribution problem using vehicle platoons guided by professional drivers. An optimal routing algorithm is in charge of defining platoons drivers’ routes to the parking areas where the followers are parked in a complete automated mode.

The main idea of VALET is to retrieve vehicles parked randomly on the urban parking network by users. These parking spaces may be in electric charging stations (if we have a fleet of electric vehicles), parking for car sharing vehicles (e.g. Autolib in Paris) or in regular parking places. As for the vehicles, they may be car-sharing vehicles, rental cars, future automated taxis, etc. Once the vehicles are collected and guided in a platooning mode, the objective is then to guide them to their allocated parking area or to their respective parking lots. Then each vehicle is assigned a parking place into which it has to park in an automated mode.

Furtherfore, VALET project proposes to endow autonomous vehicles with smart behaviors (cooperation, negotiation, socially acceptable movements) that better suit complex urban situations (with the presence of pedestrians, man-driven vehicles and other autonomous vehicles). It will integrate models of human behaviors (pedestrian and/or drivers), proxemics (human management of space) and traffic rules, as well as smart navigation strategies that will manage interdependent behaviors of road users and of cybercars.
The final system will be tested on real demonstrations in an urban environment.
The starting point of VALET project is the different prototype autonomous vehicles that partners already have (4-5 vehicles).



Project coordination

Fawzi Nashashibi (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique)

The author of this summary is the project coordinator, who is responsible for the content of this summary. The ANR declines any responsibility as for its contents.

Partner

INRIA-Grenoble-PRIMA institut national de recherche en informatique et automatique
AKKA INFORMATIQUE ET SYSTEMES
LS2N LABORATOIRE DES SCIENCES DU NUMERIQUE DE NANTES
Inria Centre de Paris Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique

Help of the ANR 886,537 euros
Beginning and duration of the scientific project: September 2015 - 36 Months

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