Autonomous driving will play an important role in the future of transportation. Various autonomous vehicles have been demonstrated at the DARPA Urban Challenge [3]. General Motors has recently unveiled their Electrical-Networked Vehicles (EN-V) in Shanghai, China [5]. One of the main challenges of autonomous driving in urban areas is transition through cross-roads and intersections. In addition to safety concerns, current intersection management technologies such as stop signs and traffic lights can introduce significant traffic delays even under light traffic conditions.Our goal is to design and develop efficient and reliable intersection protocols to avoid vehicle collisions at intersections and increase the traffic throughput. The focus of this paper is investigating vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications as a part of co-operative driving in the context of autonomous vehicles. We study how our proposed V2V intersection protocols can be beneficial for autonomous driving, and show significant improvements in throughput. We also prove that our protocols avoid deadlock situations inside the intersection area. The simulation results show that our new proposed V2V intersection protocols provide both safe passage through the intersection and significantly decrease the delay at the intersection and our latest V2V intersection protocol yields over 85% overall performance improvement over the common traffic light models.

A substantial fraction of automotive collisions occur at intersections. Statistics collected by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) show that more than 2.8 million intersection-related crashes occur in the United States each year, with such crashes constituting more than 44 percent of all reported crashes [12]. In addition, there is a desire to increase throughput at intersections by reducing the delay introduced by stop signs and traffic signals. In the future, when dealing with autonomous vehicles, some form of cooperative driving is also necessary at intersections to address safety and throughput concerns. In this paper, we investigate the use of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications to enable the navigation of traffic intersections, to mitigate collision risks, and to increase intersection throughput significantly. Specifically, we design a vehicular network protocol that integrates with mobile wireless radio communication standards such as Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) and Wireless Access in a Vehicular Environment (WAVE). This protocol relies primarily on using V2V communications, GPS and other automotive sensors to safely navigate intersections and also to enable autonomous vehicle control. Vehicles use DSRC/WAVE wireless media to periodically broadcast their position information along with the driving intentions as they approach intersections. We used the hybrid simulator called GrooveNet [1, 2] in order to study different driving scenarios at intersections using simulated vehicles interacting with each other. Our simulation results indicate that very reasonable improvements in safe throughput are possible across many practical traffic scenarios.

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We have been investigating vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications as a part of co-operative driving in the context of autonomous driving. In this work, we study the effects of position inaccuracy of commonly-used GPS devices on some of our V2V intersection protocols and suggest required modifications to guarantee their safety and efficiency despite these impairments.