Elderly Driver Assistance Systems with Cooperation between Vehicles: the Concept and Experiments

This paper proposes a new concept of elderly driver assistance systems, which performs the assistance by the cooperative driving between two vehicles, and describes some experiments with elderly drivers. The assistance consists of one vehicle driven by an elderly driver called a guest vehicle and the other driven by a assisting driver called a host vehicle, and the host vehicle assists or escorts the guest vehicle through the inter-vehicle communications. The functions of the systems installed on a single-seat electric vehicle are highly evaluated by subjects of elderly drivers in virtual streets on a test track.