OpenConvoy: Universal Platform for Real-World Testing of Cooperative Driving Systems

Cooperative driving, enabled by communication between automated vehicle systems, promises significant benefits to fuel efficiency, road capacity, and safety over single-vehicle driver assistance systems such as adaptive cruise control (ACC). However, the responsible development and implementation of these algorithms poses substantial challenges due to the need for extensive real-world testing. We address this issue and introduce OpenConvoy, an open and extensible framework designed for the implementation and assessment of cooperative driving policies on physical connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs). We demonstrate the capabilities of OpenConvoy through a series of experiments on a convoy of multi-scale vehicles controlled by Platooning to show the stability of our system across vehicle configurations and its ability to effectively measure convoy cohesion across driving scenarios including varying degrees of communication loss.