6G wireless, sub-project: vehicular communications

Although connected autonomous vehicles can successfully navigate in constrained spaces, such as intersections, they do not have common objectives when arbitrating such spaces. In fact, their potentially greedy behaviour can be counter-productive in view of the objectives of the shared space, namely, traffic throughput, safety, and in some cases, prioritisation. The challenges of scalability, robustness, and uncertainty are at the core of this project and are essential in realising fully autonomous vehicles. Here, sources of uncertainty are for example; quality of the wireless links, computation time of decision algorithms, availability of computational capacity, quality of sensor values, and the behaviour of other vehicles, autonomous, remotely controlled and human-driven. Without considering scalability, road infrastructures will not be well utilised and travel times will be dismal. Without considering robustness, road infrastructure will fail when communication networks and computational resources do. Without taking into account inevitable uncertainty, road infrastructures will be underperforming. Most importantly, without any of them, traffic safety will be severely compromised.

The purpose of this project is to address the above challenges through the design of decision making algorithms for connected autonomous vehicles at city intersections as well as the next generation i.e. 6G, vehicular communication protocols to support underlying interactions.