Improving efficiency and safety of urban traffic by infrastructure-supported cooperative maneuvers

Especially in urban traffic, the field of view of road users is often occluded by buildings, vegetation, or other road users. Thus, conservative driving decisions have to be made, which allow one to always react appropriately and obey traffic rules. Intelligent infrastructure along the roadside, data fusion and cooperative planning services on edge computing servers, and vehicle-to-anything communication can help overcome this limitation and–thus–improve traffic efficiency while retaining safety for all road users. This article summarizes the architecture of such a system, prototyped in Ulm, Germany. Further, it presents results from tests involving connected automated and non-automated vehicles and connected vulnerable road users in regular non-connected traffic, realizing different cooperative maneuvers.