Cartography for cooperative manoeuvres with autonomous land vehicles

This article presents a cartographic system to facilitate cooperative manoeuvres among autonomous vehicles in a well-known environment. The main objective is to design an extended cartographic system to help in the navigation of autonomous vehicles. This system has to allow the vehicles not only to access the reference points needed for navigation, but also noticeable information such as the location and type of traffic signals, the proximity to a crossing, the streets en route, etc. To do this, a hierarchical representation of the information has been chosen, where the information has been stored in two levels. The lower level contains the archives with the Universal Traverse Mercator (UTM) coordinates of the points that define the reference segments to follow. The upper level contains a directed graph with the relational database in which streets, crossings, roundabouts and other points of interest are represented. Using this new system it is possible to know when the vehicle approaches a crossing, what other paths arrive at that crossing, and, should there be other vehicles circulating on those paths and arriving at the crossing, which one has the highest priority. The data obtained from the cartographic system is used by the autonomous vehicles for cooperative manoeuvres.