Cooperative Collision Warning Systems: Concept Definition and Experimental Implementation

The concept of cooperative collision warning (CCW) systems is introduced and explained, followed by presentation of experimental results showing the performance of a first prototype CCW system. The CCW concept provides warnings or situation awareness displays to drivers based on information about the motions of neighboring vehicles obtained by wireless communications from those vehicles, without use of any ranging sensors. This has the advantages of a potentially inexpensive complement of onboard vehicle equipment (compared to ranging sensors that could provide 360 degree coverage), as well as providing information from vehicles that may be occluded from direct line of sight to the approaching vehicle. The CCW concept has been tested on a fleet of five prototype vehicles, supporting a variety of safety services (forward collision warning, blind spot and lane change situation awareness and several modes of intersection threat assessment). The performance of the vehicle position estimation and wireless communication subsystems are demonstrated using samples of experimental data from test sites with both good and bad GPS signal availability.