Empty Vehicles in the Praxitele Project

In this paper, advanced mission programming issues for autonomous vehicles are addressed. We describe the use of structural speciication and formal veriication in experiments involving the PRAXITELE project's autonomous vehicles. The environment used, called Orccad, proposes a coherent approch from hight-level speci-cation of missions down to its implementation, by harmoniously integration discrete and continuous aspects. Veriication tools, based on the use of synchronous languages for the reactive part of the system are also used in the programming environment. The goal of the programmed mission is to redistribue a number of empty vehicles, employing only one driver. When a vehicle has reached its destination, it can break away from the platoon and parallel park all by itself. The platooning technique is based on vision with a linear camera and the parallel parking technique is based on ultra-sound. The chaining of the pla-tooning and the parking is decided by the train conductor using a radio system.