A cooperative personal automated transport system: A CityMobil demonstration in Rocquencourt

This article tackles the problem of the autonomous navigation and coordination of multiple driverless vehicles for the transport of persons or goods in outdoor environments. The system composed of fully automated road vehicles, capable of providing an effective transportation service, was recently tested at the city of La Rochelle. This same system was further improved, and a new demonstration was performed at Inria Rocquencourt, in order to demonstrate the validity of the concepts for a coordinated navigation in the presence of ambiguous and conflictual situations in a mixed environment. The originality of the approach relies on the use of new cooperative concepts and their combination with advanced perception tasks operating simultaneously on several robots. This system was developed in the context of the European project CityMobil.