OpenConvoy: Universal Platform for Real-World Testing of Cooperative Driving Systems
Owen Burns, Hossein Maghsoumi, Yaser Fallah, Israel Charles
TL;DR
OpenConvoy addresses the lack of a universal, real-world testing platform for cooperative driving by delivering an open, modular framework that runs on diverse hardware stacks with ROS1/ROS2 and MAVLink compatibility. It enables arbitrary cooperative-driving algorithms to be implemented and evaluated on physical vehicles, using standardized V2V communication and a flexible information-flow topology. The authors validate the platform through three-vehicle platooning experiments under varying communication losses, demonstrating stability and the ability to quantify convoy cohesion, and show consistency with prior simulator-based results. This work reduces the sim-to-real gap and provides a scalable benchmark tool for real-world testing of cooperative driving policies, with potential to extend to larger platoons and MPC-based controllers.
Abstract
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.