Vehicular Visible Light Positioning with a Single Receiver

Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication and positioning systems are expected to play an important role in the development of future automated and autonomous vehicle safety concepts. Visible light communication and positioning (VLC and VLP) promise high data rates and cm-level positioning accuracy, respectively, with vehicle head/tail lights. Existing methods for vehicular VLP often require multiple spatially-separated co-operating nodes with either tightly synchronized clocks or precisely known relative locations and they dictate certain modulation schemes or message content for the VLC subsystem. The proposed novel VLP method utilizes a single VLC receiver capable of measuring angle-of-arrival (AoA) on a receiving vehicle (RXV). The method dictates no modulation constraints on the VLC subsystem and no co-operation is required from the transmitting vehicle (TXV) other than disseminating its real-time speed and heading information via VLC. The method uses speed and heading data and two consecutive AoA samples from the same receiver to deduce 2D position of the TXV relative to the RXV with triangulation. Simulation results show the method performs cm-level positioning accuracy at >50Hz rates under realistic road and VLC channel conditions. With such performance, the proposed VLP method enables time-critical traffic safety applications like collision avoidance.