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I t may not be obvious, but comms links are a key technology for autonomous systems. While there is a huge amount of r&d being carried out on sensing the environment immediately around the vehicle and using the resulting data for decision-making, there are key advantages to having data coming in from the wider area. For example, in the military sector, submersible mine detection systems keep in touch with each other by sharing timing data that allows them to maintain both absolute and relative positions under the sea. One of the most active sectors for making this approach a reality is in the vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) data links for driverless cars, building on the development of collision and threat detection for the ‘connected car’. The consensus is that an onboard camera or radar can only see one to two cars in front, while the connected car will get data from many cars ahead, with that data being broadcast to every nearby vehicle. Development programmes over the past five years in Europe such as Car2Car, and in the US the Department of Transportation’s Connected Vehicle Safety Pilot Model Deployment, have resulted in that technology rolling out now. The next stage is to use this technology for techniques such as ‘platooning’, where the speed of a string of vehicles is adjusted according to the conditions ahead. This could mean avoiding ‘stop- start’ traffic or adjusting the speed of a group of cars so they all roll through a green light in one go. The timetable for the deployment of connected cars in Japan for example has three stages, and began last year with the deployment of vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) data links from cars to the side of the road, for applications such as signal recognition, rear-end collision prevention, and stop-sign recognition enhancement. In parallel, the V2V applications provide a transition from a field operation test to a pilot programme this year, the aim being to deploy this technology in cars in 2016 and 2017. A key issue though is which frequency band to use for V2V, as a global agreement allows system developers to produce lower-cost equipment instead of having to make different versions for different markets. In Japan, the 760 MHz band is available for V2V and V2I 69 Wide-area communications links will be needed if unmanned systems are to work together. Nick Flaherty reports on the strategies emerging to make that happen Datacomms | Insight Broadcast news General Motors is adding vehicle-to-vehicle communications to its Cadillac CTS Sedan model in 2017 as a key step towards driverless vehicles (Courtesy of General Motors) Unmanned Systems Technology | November 2014