An empirical response time analysis for automated vehicles systems

Abstract

This paper investigates the observable response times of commercial cruise control systems. The behavioral comparison is performed based on empirical observations from three well-known experimental campaigns in the literature. In recent years, apart from the already commercially available Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC), an upcoming system called Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) has been developed to control the speed of vehicles. The goal of this work is to compare the behavior of these systems on the basis of response time, that is the delay from the moment of a stimulus until the reaction of the controller. Observations from two datasets with ACC and CACC experiments, the OpenACC dataset, developed by the European Commission and the CARMA dataset developed by the U.S. Department of Transportation, were considered. Three state-of-the- art techniques were implemented to provide quantitative results for the vehicles’ response times. The benefits and downsides of each technique are discussed as well. The results show that ACC does not exhibit a significant improvement compared to human drivers, yet it can be concluded that the additional vehicle-to-vehicle communication incorporated in the CACC system allows a significantly lower response time.