Lane Departure Warning System using Standard GPS Technology and V2V Communication

Lane departure warning system (LDWS) has significant potential to reduce crashes. Generally, an LDWS uses various image processing techniques or global positioning system (GPS) technology with lane-level resolution maps. However, these are expensive to implement and have performance limitations, such as harsh weather or irregular lane markings can drastically reduce their performances. Previously, we developed an LDWS which generated road reference heading (RRH) from a vehicle’s past travel trajectories acquired by GPS to detect unintentional lane departure. However, when a vehicle travels for the first time on a given road, it does not have any past trajectory to generate the RRH needed to detect unintentional lane departure. To overcome this limitation, we have augmented our previously developed LDWS by adding a vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communication feature to it, which can acquire the required RRH from a nearby vehicle via V2V communication. We have extensively tested the V2V communication feature of our current LDWS in the field to evaluate its performance in real-time. Test results show that the RRH of a given road can be successfully transferred from one vehicle to another on demand, and the LDWS can detect each unintentional lane departure accurately in a timely manner.