Collision avoidance system with UNI-directional communication for mitigating the adverse effects on following vehicles

Many types of advanced driver assistance system such as collision warning system and collision avoidance system are proposed to improve the vehicle’s safety. The previous proposed systems contribute in reducing the occurrence of accidents and their severity. However, these systems produce a warning signal and activate the automatic braking based on the information of preceding vehicle using vehicle to vehicle communication, as well as information obtained by the sensors installed in the subject vehicle. These systems improve the safety of subject vehicle, but has a negative influence on the safety of following vehicles. Moreover, they disturb the subject vehicle’s driving comfort by the extremely high deceleration rate. In this study, we propose a cooperative collision avoidance system that can predictively activate the automatic braking with uni-directional communication. This proposed system activates a minor deceleration in advance when a high collision risk is foreseen at the downstream. The proposed system is evaluated with a microscopic traffic simulation in various traffic scenarios with variation of traffic density, speed, vehicle class, and braking performance. The test results show that the proposed system effectively prevents the accident with relatively lower deceleration rate compared with the existing collision avoidance systems such as Mazda algorithm, Honda algorithm, and Berkeley algorithm. Due to the low deceleration rate, the occurrence of dangerous situations from other following vehicles is significantly reduced and the magnitude of shockwave is also attenuated.