Traffic Flow Modeling and Simulation using Micro Intelligent Vehicles

Traffic flow experiments using Micro Intelligent Vehicle (MicroIV) are more efficient and easier to achieve than experiments in actual traffic environment. In this paper, a MicroIV based traffic flow modeling and simulation method is proposed. Firstly, the framework of MicroIV is presented aiming at satisfying the requirements of multi-task and potential extended functions in traffic flow simulation. Secondly, a global path planning approach using time division based hierarchical topology maps, which takes specific traffic rules into consideration, is developed to overcome the difficulties of navigation in micro scale and using hierarchical topology maps for global path planning. Thirdly, in the part of environmental perception, an active vision approach based on improved visual selection attention is proposed to realize more efficient and robust detection of traffic light, and an improved spatial-bag-of-features method is used to make traffic sign recognition more adaptable. Experimental results show that the MicroIV is proved to be suitable for traffic flow simulation.