Autonomous collective adjustment of vehicles motion on a highway

This paper describes a fully autonomous decentralized method for synchronizing the interaction of vehicles moving on a highway. The method synchronizes the vehicles using simultaneous signal transmission from a group of transmitters to a group of receivers. With this feature, data exchange speed is increased, and the computing abilities of vehicles are connected into a moving computing cluster. The autonomous system operates without external controllers. Due to decentralization, the group of vehicles implements the synchronization process without any system control center. The group members interconnect via wireless optical and radio communication channels. There are two interacting stages of the synchronization process. The first stage is intended to perform decentralized coordination and information exchange within the group and determine the location, speed, and motion direction of the group members. The first stage passes initial information to the second stage. The second stage provides much more accurate vehicle tracking data and simultaneous information exchange between the groups of transmitters and receivers. Message transmission is synchronized very precisely (up to a single bit). In particular, necessary information about n vehicles is quickly acquired and transmitted to all receivers using one common message containing no more than n digits. Thus, the provided solution allows collecting the necessary information for vehicle coordination on highway sections, combining every vehicle's computing capability into one mobile computing cluster.