Cooperative Driving at Adjacent Blind Intersections

Cooperative driving technology with intervehicle communication attracts increasing interests in the last decade. Under cooperative driving guidance, motion of individual vehicles can be conducted in a more safe, deterministic and smooth manner, which is particularly useful to heavy duty vehicles, since their acceleration/ deceleration capacity is relatively low. Specifically in this paper, cooperative driving at adjacent blind intersections (intersections without traffic lights) is studied. A concept named "safety driving patterns" is proposed to represent the collision free movements of all encountered vehicles at intersections. The solution space of allowable movement schedules is then described by a spanning tree in terms of safety driving patterns. The trajectory planning algorithms are also formulated to determine the driving plans with least execution times using schedule trees.