Infrared-based position determination for augmented cognition utilization in miniaturized traffic test facilities

New infrastructure-less traffic collision avoidance systems are currently developed for road and railway transportation. Similar to maritime and air transport a significant increase in safety is expected by exploiting direct vehicle-to-vehicle communication to detect possible collision threats and to immediately warn the driver. Augmented cognition is a key feature to expand the driver’s “view” or to support the self awareness of intelligent onboard units in such critical situations. To design new control and collision avoidance systems and to assess their performance, it is essential to emulate the interaction of centralized traffic management components with partly autonomous vehicles or their drivers. For this purpose test facilities can be operated, e.g. in case of railway transportation using train models to reduce costs and to avoid substantial damage. Concomitant with this approach, a millimetre level localisation of vehicle models is required for small-scale indoor test environments. In this paper we present an infrared based positioning concept that allows simulation of the vehicle’s and driver’s access to additional traffic relevant information like position or velocity of vehicles in the vicinity. ISSN 1616-0762 Sonderdruck Schriftenreihe der Georg-Simon-Ohm-Hochschule Nürnberg Nr. Infrared-based position determination for augmented cognition utilization in miniaturized traffic test facilities