Aiding Autonomous Vehicles with Fault-tolerant V2V Communication

TL;DR

This paper presents a fault-tolerant V2V communication approach for autonomous vehicles, enhancing safety and efficiency during intersection crossing despite communication failures, using a distributed algorithm validated with real data.

Contribution

It introduces a novel distributed fault-tolerant V2V algorithm for autonomous vehicles, specifically addressing intersection crossing scenarios with robustness to communication failures.

Findings

Crossing delay increases slightly during V2V failures

V2V communication remains effective in most scenarios

Fault-tolerance improves safety and efficiency

Abstract

Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication is a key component of the future autonomous driving systems. V2V can provide an improved awareness of the surrounding environment, and the knowledge about the future actions of nearby vehicles. However, V2V communication is subject to different kind of failures and delays, so a distributed fault-tolerant approach is required for safe and efficient transportation. This work considers fully autonomous vehicles that operates using local sensory information, and aided with fault-tolerant V2V communication. The sensors provide all basic functionality, but are overridden by V2V whenever is possible to increase the efficiency. As an example scenario, we consider intersection crossing (IC) with autonomous vehicles that cooperate via V2V communication, and propose a fully distributed and a fault-tolerant algorithm for this problem. According to our numerical results, based on a real data set, we show the crossing delay is only slightly increased in the presence of a burst of V2V failures, and that V2V can be successfully used in most scenarios.