Proactive safety - Cooperative collision warning for vehicles

Telematics is an interdisciplinary technology that combines telecommunications, vehicular technologies, road transportation, road safety, electrical engineering, and computer science to provide applications and services for the purpose of comfort and safety enhancement. From the timing point of view, the driving safety can be classified into two domains: (1) active safety and (2) passive safety. Passive safety systems are used to reduce damage and protect passengers and drivers when an accident occurs. Common passive safety systems include airbags, seatbelts, whiplash injury lessening systems, and energy absorbing steering column. Active safety systems are used to prevent accidents before they occur. An example of active safety system is the collision warning/avoidance system. It basically collects/detects neighboring vehicles’ motion states to compute potential collision between vehicles. Based on future technology, cooperative active safety systems emerge. Vehicles can exchange their information between each other through wireless communication [1], for example, over a vehicular ad hoc network (VANET), for cooperative purposes such as collision warning/avoidance. In a project named smart intersection, a collision avoidance system based on the concept of active safety was developed by Ford and the US government [2]. The system collects a vehicle’s information like Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates, velocity, and heading and delivers it through wireless communication to other vehicles in order to prevent accidents and congestion before vehicles arrive to an intersection. To understand the details of cooperative collision warning (CCW), this chapter exposes main factors that affect the accuracy of CCW, challenges of CCW, communication techniques for cooperative safety, and collision prediction techniques. CCW systems are also introduced in detail. Moreover, we present some existing safety-related techniques and systems that are developed by automobile manufacturers.