Effects of Vehicular Communication on Risk Assessment in Automated Driving Vehicles

This paper proposes a human-centered risk assessment algorithm designed to find the intervention moment of drive mode and active safety mode while monitoring threat vehicles ahead to overcome effects of vehicular communication on risk assessment in automated driving vehicle. Although a conventional radar system is known to be best fitted on-board ranging sensor in terms of longitudinal safety, it is generally not enough for a reliable automated driving because of sensing uncertainty of the traffic environments and incomplete perception results due to sensor limitations. This can be overcome by implementing vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication which provides complementary source of target vehicle’s dynamic behavior. Using V2V communication with vehicle internal and surround information obtained from the on-board sensor system, future vehicle motion has been predicted. With accurately predicted motion of a remote vehicle, a collision risk and the automated drive mode are determined by incorporating human factor. Effects of the V2V communication on a human-centered risk assessment algorithm have been investigated through a safe triangle analysis. The computer simulation studies have been conducted in order to validate the performance of the proposed algorithm. It has been shown that the V2V communication with the proposed risk assessment algorithm allows a faster drive mode decision and active safety intervention moment.