Spectrum Analytic Approach for Cooperative Navigation of Connected and Autonomous Vehicles

The imminent pervasive deployment of connected and autonomous vehicle (CAV) technology offers various opportunities for new applications. Particularly, the cooperative behavior capability of CAVs is invaluable for critical operations within the transportation system. In this paper, we present an approach for cooperative CAVs to support the navigation of emergency vehicles in the traffic. We first lay out the trajectory planning problem for an emergency vehicle and formalize it in terms of the locations and accelerations of vehicles in a certain range of the emergency vehicle. Then, this problem is encoded onto a graph, where we map the safety constraints using the edge weights. We show that cooperative planning of the surrounding vehicles can be accomplished by an optimization problem, where the objective is to maximize the second largest eigenvalue of the resulting graph Laplacian. The simulation study demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed system in terms of the resulting trajectories and the corresponding perturbation in the whole system.