Vehicle-to-Vehicle Visible Light Range-Finding and Communication Using the Automotive LED Lighting ; Mesure de distance et transmission de données inter-véhicules par phares à LED

In response to the growing issues induced by road traffic - accidents, pollution, congestion- low-carbon vehicles equipped with intelligent transportation systems (ITS) are being developed.Although the final goal is full autonomy, the vehicles of the near future will most probably be selfdrivingin certain phases only, as in platooning. Platooning allows several vehicles to moveautomatically in platoons and thus to increase road capacity while reducing fuel consumption. Thereliability of this ITS is based on several core technologies and in particular on vehicle-to-vehicle(V2V) distance measurement and data transmission.These two vital functions can be implemented with several kinds of systems as, for instance, radars orlidars for range-finding and IEEE 802.11p-based devices for vehicular communication. Althoughthese systems provide good performances, they are very sensitive to interferences, which may be agrowing issue as the number of vehicles equipped will increase, especially in dense traffic scenario.In order to mitigate the performance degradation occurring in such situations, complementarysolutions may be useful. The recent developments of white light-emitting diodes (LED), especiallyfor the automotive lighting, has allowed the emergence of visible light communication (VLC). WithVLC, the vehicle headlamps and taillights are used to transmit data to other vehicles orinfrastructures. Despite the limited optical power available, several studies have shown thatcommunication over tens of meters are possible with a low bit error rate (BER). VLC could thus bean interesting complement to IEEE 802.11p, especially in platooning applications. By analogy, onecould wonder if the automotive lighting can also be used for V2V range-finding.The goal of this thesis is thus to propose and evaluate a system dedicated to platooning configurationsthat can perform simultaneously the V2V distance measurement and data transmission functionsusing the headlamps and taillights of the vehicles. The first step of this study is thus a ...