Toward highly automated driving by vehicle-to-infrastructure communications

This paper presents a cooperative system by vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications that extends the range of environmental perception and improves the performance of situation awareness for highly automated driving. The paper consists of two steps: data fusion based situation awareness and distributed reasoning based situation assessment. The data fusion produces a V2I augmented map to provide a better understanding of driving situations by integrating road infrastructures with a high-precision map. The distributed reasoning evaluates a risky level of a current situation in terms of road infrastructures through the use of independent local experts which are distributed into lane-level local regions of the vehicle´s surroundings. The recommendations for driving behaviors are determined by the combination of results from each expert. The system is tested and evaluated through in-vehicle tests on a highway test road to verify that it can determine appropriate reactions under road hazard situations, such as black ice and construction.