Communication-based collision avoidance between vulnerable road users and cars

The advent of wireless communication for vehicles paves the road for a bounty of cooperative applications: The most interesting being cooperative safety awareness. By exchanging information vehicles can become aware of each other and prevent dangerous situations that can lead to crashes either by early warning drivers or by automatic vehicle control, a solution particularly appealing for self-driving cars. While research on vehicular safety mainly focuses on vehicle-to-vehicle safety, we can exploit communication to implement applications aimed at protecting vulnerable road users, such as pedestrians or cyclists. In this paper, we start by exploiting a probability framework for estimating the likelihood of collision between a vehicles approaching an intersection and a cyclist, in light of the feasibility of communication between the two. On top of this framework, we design a simple application that, under certain conditions, informs the car driver (assumed to have to yield precedence) of the possible collision. We model the reaction of the driver to the warning and analyze possible benefits and drawbacks of such an application. The contribution is not the application itself, which is obvious, but the insights in the results in light of communication capabilities and human reaction that provide a specific set of aspects that should be considered in the design of such a safety system.