Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication for Autonomous Vehicles: Safety and Maneuver Planning

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) have the potential to transform road transportation by improving safety and increasing traffic/fuel efficiency. Currently, AVs rely primarily on line-of-sight sensing technologies to gather information about their surroundings. Some of the surrounding objects (e.g., vehicles, infrastructure, and pedestrians), however, can potentially communicate with the AV to help it create a better digital map of the world around it. In this work, we quantify the gains vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication can provide for AVs. Specifically, we focus on the safety and maneuver planning of the AVs. Our preliminary findings indicate that V2V can reduce a significant fraction of AV collisions. Further, V2V can considerably reduce the maneuver completion time.