Vehicular Visible Light Communications for Automated Valet Parking

Abstract: Visible light communication (VLC) is a promising Optical Wireless Communications (OWC) scheme that is demonstrated to provide secure, line-of-sight (LoS), and short-distance vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure(V2I) communications. Recently, automated driving applications, supported by V2I links are proposed to increase the reliability of the autonomous vehicles. To this regard, we propose a VLCbased V2I scheme to increase the V2I communication redundancy of autonomous valet parking (AVP) applications, through jam-free and location-based characteristics of VLC. In this paper, we demonstrate a novel architecture to support indoor parking-garage online-map update with vehicle on-board data transmissions and location-based map update dissemination through bidirectional VLC communications. The proposed system yields error-free LoS transmissions with Direct Current Biased Optical OFDM (DCO-OFDM) up to 33 m transmitter-receiver distance enabling vehicle CAN Bus data, infrastructure camera video, and LIDAR point cloud data sharing in an indoor parking garage.