Cooperatively Interacting Vehicles: Methods and Effects of Automated Cooperation in Traffic

Abstract

This open access book explores the recent developments automated driving and Car2x-communications are opening up attractive opportunities future mobility. The DFG priority program “Cooperatively Interacting Automobiles” has focused on the scientific foundations for communication-based automated cooperativity in traffic.

Communication among traffic participants allows for safe and convenient traffic that will emerge in swarm like flow. This book investigates requirements for a cooperative transport system, motion generation that is safe and effective and yields social acceptance by all road users, as well as appropriate system architectures and robust cooperative cognition.

For many years, traffic will not be fully automated, but automated vehicles share their space with manually driven vehicles, two-wheelers, pedestrians, and others. Such a mixed traffic scenario exhibits numerous facets of potential cooperation. Automated vehicles must understand basic principles of human interaction in traffic situations. Methods for the anticipation of human movement as well as methods for generating behavior that can be anticipated by others are required. Explicit maneuver coordination among automated vehicles using Car2X-communications allows generation of safe trajectories within milliseconds, even in safety-critical situations, in which drivers are unable to communicate and react, whereas today's vehicles delete their information after passing through a situation, cooperatively interacting automobiles should aggregate their knowledge in a collective data and information base and make it available to subsequent traffic.