Avoiding Rear-End Collisions by Low-Cost Inter-Vehicular Communications

During the last decade, active safety systems have gained an ever increasing attention in the research community changing the automotive electronic landscape, by complementing passive safety systems such as seat belts and air bags. However, despite advances in vehicular active and passive safety devices the rate of fatalities in Europe has remained near 40,000/year for the past 15 years. The present study aims at replying to the need for improving active and passive safety of road driving, through new methods and technology for detecting hazard driving condition and avoiding or mitigating the consequences of a road accident, such as rear-end collision. In particular, this contribution is a pilot study to verify and assess the reliability of a new model and procedure for collision warning system based on low cost inter-vehicular communications, (only a cheap radio transmitter/receiver, mounted on each vehicle is needed), where GPS and other distance vector-based networks are not employed. A signal processing method, namely the binomial test, that aims at preventing rear-end collision is here proposed. The performance of the method, in terms of probability of detection, is evaluated versus several driving conditions, in terms of values of relative speed and distance between vehicles. In addition, the Time to Collision (TTC), generally required before declaring a correct detection by existing collision systems implemented in recent vehicles, is evaluated for several driving scenarios characterized by different setting parameters. Our numerical results confirm the validity of such an approach in preventing rear-end collisions, allowing a fast detection of approaching sources.