Event-triggered Add-on Safety for Connected and Automated Vehicles Using Road-side Network Infrastructure

TL;DR

This paper introduces an event-triggered safety mechanism for connected vehicles that uses roadside infrastructure to enable timely braking, balancing collision avoidance with vehicle maneuverability, validated through LTE and 5G simulations.

Contribution

It presents a novel add-on safety system activated by infrastructure communication, enhancing vehicle safety and control during dangerous situations.

Findings

The safety mechanism improves collision avoidance.

LTE and 5G communication technologies are effectively integrated.

Simulation results show increased safety margins.

Abstract

This paper proposes an event-triggered add-on safety mechanism to adjust the control parameters for timely braking in a networked vehicular system while maintaining maneuverability. Passenger vehicle maneuverability is significantly affected by the combined-slip friction effect, in which larger longitudinal tire slips result in considerable drop in lateral tire forces. This is of higher importance when unexpected dangerous situations occur on the road and immediate actions, such as braking, need to be taken to avoid collision. Harsh braking can lead to high-slip and loss of maneuverability, hence, timely braking is essential to reduce high-slip scenarios. In addition to the vehicles own active safety systems, the proposed event-triggered add-on safety is activated upon being informed about dangers by the road-side infrastructure. The aim is to incorporate the add-on safety feature to adjust the automatic control parameters for smooth and timely braking such that a collision is avoided while vehicle's maneuverability is maintained. We study two different wireless technologies for communication between the infrastructure and the vehicles, the Long-Term Evolution (LTE) and the fifth generation (5G) schemes. The framework is validated through high-fidelity software simulations and the advantages of including the add-on feature to augment the safety margins for each communication technology is evaluated.