A new collision warning system for lead vehicles in rear-end collisions

Collision Warning Systems (CWS) are safety systems designed to warn the driver about an imminent collision. A CWS monitors the dynamic state of the traffic in realtime by processing information from various proprioceptive and exteroceptive sensors. It assesses the potential threat level and decides whether a warning should be issued to the driver through auditory and/or visual signals. Several measures have already been defined for threat assessment and various CWS have been proposed in literature. In this paper, we will focus on two time-based measures that assess both front and rear collision threats. In particular, a new threat metric, the time-to-last-second-acceleration (Tlsa), for lead vehicles in rear-end collision is proposed and compared with its counterpart, the time-to-last-second-braking (Tlsb) [18]. The Tlsa is a novel time-based approach that focuses on the lead vehicle (as opposed to the following vehicle). It inherits the properties of the Tlsb and, as such, is coherent with the human judgement of urgency and severity of threats. It directly quantifies the threat level of the current dynamic situation before a required evasive action (i.e. maximum acceleration) needs to be applied. Furthermore, different warning thresholds are proposed by considering the average driver reaction time. Its effect on decreasing the severity of a rear-end collision is studied and its reliability is tested using a well-established physics-based robotics simulator, namely Webots [13].