DGPS-Based Vehicle-to-Vehicle Cooperative Collision Warning: Engineering Feasibility Viewpoints

The vehicle collision warning system (CWS) is an important research and application subject for vehicle safety. Most of this topic's research focuses on autonomous CWSs, where each vehicle detects potential collisions based entirely on the information measured by itself. Recently, an alternative scenario has arisen. This scenario is known as cooperative driving, where either the vehicle or the infrastructure can communicate its location, intention, or other information to surrounding vehicles or nearby infrastructure. Since installing a low-cost global-positioning-system (GPS) unit is becoming a common practice in vehicle applications, its implications in cooperative driving and vehicle safety deserve closer investigation. Furthermore, the future trajectory prediction may lead to a straightforward approach to detect potential collisions, yet its effectiveness has not been studied. This paper explores the engineering feasibility of a future-trajectory-prediction-based cooperative CWS when vehicles are equipped with a relatively simple differential GPS unit and relatively basic motion sensors. The goals of this paper are twofold: providing an engineering argument of possible functional architectures of such systems and presenting a plausible example of the proposed future-trajectory-based design, which estimates and communicates vehicle positions and predicts and processes future trajectories for collision decision making. In this paper, common GPS problems such as blockage and multipath, as well as common communication problems such as dropout and delays, are assumed. However, specific choices of GPS devices and communication protocol or systems are not the focus of this paper