Cooperative Driving at Blind Crossings Using Intervehicle Communication

Cooperative driving technology with intervehicle communication has attracted increasing attention recently. It aims to improve driving safety and efficiency using appropriate motion scheduling of all the encountered vehicles. Under cooperative driving control, the motion of individual vehicles could be conducted in a safe, deterministic, and smooth manner. This is particularly useful to heavy-duty vehicles since their acceleration/deceleration capacity is relatively low. Specifically in this paper, cooperative driving at blind crossings (crossings without traffic lights) is studied. A concept of safety driving patterns is proposed to represent the collision-free movements of vehicles at crossings. The solution space of all allowable movement schedules is then described by a spanning tree in terms of safety driving patterns; four trajectory planning algorithms are formulated to determine the driving plans with least execution times using schedule trees. The group communication strategy for intervehicle networks is also analyzed. Finally, simulation studies have been conducted, and results demonstrate the potentiality and usefulness of the proposed algorithms for cooperative driving at blind crossings.