3.3.1 Proposed Technology 3: Autonomous Impact Protection Vehicle Although, the advancement of Connected and Autonomous vehicle (CAV) technologies has grown exponentially in recent years, it is still potentially years away from wide application to travel for the general public. Nonetheless, the use of this technology in specific and controlled areas like IPV is receiving attention from many State DOTs. The autonomous impact protection vehicle (AIPV) also commonly known as autonomous truck-mounted attenuator (ATMA) vehicle is an automated version of IPV in which the driver is removed from potential harm way as the IPV is controlled from a distance. The AIPV system consists of a leader truck (LT) which guides the follower truck (FT) which is usually installed with a truck-mounted attenuator (TMA) as seen in Figure 37. An autonomous leader-follower system composed of actuators, software, electronics, and vehicle-tovehicle (V2V) communication equipment enables the FT to drive autonomously following the LT. The system, using a navigation computer, records velocity, heading, and position information of the human-driven LT to then transmit the information to the unmanned FT vehicle over a V2V communications link using data packages called “crumbs” as illustrated in Figure 38. These transmitted crumbs allow the FT to autonomously control speed and accelerations as well as control lateral movement at a programed gap distance [86, 95, 96].
Figure 37: AIPV system overview [95]
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