V2P Communication Research Articles

Vehicle-in-Virtual-Environment (VVE) Method for Autonomous Driving System Development, Evaluation and Demonstration.

The current approach to connected and autonomous driving function development and evaluation uses model-in-the-loop simulation, hardware-in-the-loop simulation and limited proving ground use, followed by public road deployment of the beta version of software and technology. The rest of the road users are involuntarily forced into taking part in the development and evaluation of these connected and autonomous driving functions in this approach. This is an unsafe, costly and inefficient method. Motivated by these shortcomings, this paper introduces the Vehicle-in-Virtual-Environment (VVE) method of safe, efficient and low-cost connected and autonomous driving function development, evaluation and demonstration. The VVE method is compared to the existing state-of-the-art. Its basic implementation for a path-following task is used to explain the method where the actual autonomous vehicle operates in a large empty area with its sensor feeds being replaced by realistic sensor feeds corresponding to its location and pose in the virtual environment. It is possible to easily change the development virtual environment and inject rare and difficult events which can be tested very safely. Vehicle-to-Pedestrian (V2P) communication-based pedestrian safety is chosen as the application use case for the VVE in this paper, and corresponding experimental results are presented and discussed. A no-line-of-sight pedestrian and vehicle moving towards each other on intersecting paths with different speeds are used in the experiments. Their time-to-collision risk zone values are compared for determining severity levels. The severity levels are used to slow down or brake the vehicle. The results show that V2P communication of pedestrian location and heading can be used successfully to avoid possible collisions. It is noted that actual pedestrians and other vulnerable road users can be used very safely in this approach.

Assessment of Pedestrian-to-Vehicle Communication Pre-Crash Safety Warnings to Avoid Collisions

In recent years, road safety is getting more attention to reduce road pedestrian accidents caused by vehicles. The research community is trying to find new techniques related to accident avoidance in the existing vehicle driver assistance systems. These techniques involve the exchange of safety critical information between pedestrians and vehicles. This is called vehicle-to-pedestrian (V2P) communication system, which provides road safety and management to different Vulnerable-Road-Users (VRUs). Furthermore, V2P communication systems use various technologies and different methods to cooperate with the VRUs. These attributes can be considered to design constraints for V2P communication system. In this paper, the authors examine V2P safety aspects and have simulated different V2P scenarios considering real environments. Moreover, the authors analyze the V2P safety in different scenarios by considering the timely exchange of safety messages. The authors presented these results in different V2P approaches for separate VRU groups in different pre-crash situations.

Active Obstacle Avoidance Trajectory Planning for Vehicles Based on Obstacle Potential Field and MPC in V2P Scenario.

V2P (vehicle-to-pedestrian) communication can improve road traffic efficiency, solve traffic congestion, and improve traffic safety. It is an important direction for the development of smart transportation in the future. Existing V2P communication systems are limited to the early warning of vehicles and pedestrians, and do not plan the trajectory of vehicles to achieve active collision avoidance. In order to reduce the adverse effects on vehicle comfort and economy caused by switching the "stop-go" state, this paper uses a PF (particle filter) to preprocess GPS (Global Positioning System) data to solve the problem of poor positioning accuracy. An obstacle avoidance trajectory-planning algorithm that meets the needs of vehicle path planning is proposed, which considers the constraints of the road environment and pedestrian travel. The algorithm improves the obstacle repulsion model of the artificial potential field method, and combines it with the A* algorithm and model predictive control. At the same time, it controls the input and output based on the artificial potential field method and vehicle motion constraints, so as to obtain the planned trajectory of the vehicle's active obstacle avoidance. The test results show that the vehicle trajectory planned by the algorithm is relatively smooth, and the acceleration and steering angle change ranges are small. Based on ensuring safety, stability, and comfort in vehicle driving, this trajectory can effectively prevent collisions between vehicles and pedestrians and improve traffic efficiency.

A V2P Collision Risk Warning Method based on LSTM in IOV

With the evolution of communication networks, the Internet of Vehicles (IOV) continues to accelerate the safe and rapid development of autonomous vehicles. Vehicle-to-Pedestrian (V2P) communication is a key technology in autonomous vehicles and a potential solution to realize collaborative intelligence between vehicles and pedestrians. However, the existing V2P communication early warning system does not consider the uncertainty of pedestrian trajectory, and the determination of the collision area is limited to a single point, resulting in an inaccurate system judgment and limited improvement of traffic efficiency. This paper designs a new autonomous-oriented V2P communication network architecture and completes a V2P communication early warning system based on Long Range (LoRa). A V2P anticollision model is established, and a new V2P collision risk early warning method is proposed. In this method, danger index is introduced into the early warning of collision between pedestrian and vehicle. The long short-term memory (LSTM) artificial neural network is used to predict the pedestrian’s trajectory, so as to deduce the pedestrian-vehicle collision risk area when the pedestrian trajectory is uncertain. Meanwhile, the confidence probability is used to judge whether the pedestrian and vehicle are warned. The simulation shows that the V2P collision risk warning method proposed in this paper has good performance, which can accurately warn the pedestrian and vehicle under different vehicle speeds and Global Positioning System (GPS) positioning errors. At the same time, it reflects the characteristics of intelligence brought by using LSTM methods. Using the V2P communication early warning system based on LoRa to verify the experimental results show that when the GPS positioning accuracy is submeter level, the prediction accuracy is greater than 98%. The results of the proposed method show good performance and high detection rate.

Testing Connected Vehicle-Based Accident Mitigation for Red-Light Violation Using Simulation Strategies

Simulation is often suggested as a way to analyze the safety improvements of geometric changes and operational strategies. But the results from simulations are mixed. This paper presents new ideas about how to do such assessments, especially in the context of testing the value of vehicle to vehicle (V2V), vehicle to infrastructure (V2I), and vehicle to pedestrian (V2P) communications in preventing crashes because of red-light violation at signalized intersections. Algorithms are created that watch for impending collisions through sensing and then issue speed and trajectory changes to avoid accidents. Red-light violation is a primary focus because it increases the likelihood that collisions will occur. VISSIM is used to test these ideas, including new communication and control algorithms that link to vehicles, pedestrians, and signal controllers through the communication interface. The algorithms predict unsafe conditions, determine an appropriate crash remedial decision, and communicate those controls with the appropriate vehicles and pedestrians. The impacts of these algorithms are explored under various demand patterns, connected vehicle market penetration rates, and red-light violation rates in a hypothetical simulated environment. The simulation analysis suggests that the number of near-crash events can be reduced significantly if V2V and V2P communications are implemented. Moreover, adding V2I communication on top of these may further reduce the number of near-crash events. These results suggest that not only could such control strategies have significant impacts, but also those impacts can be assessed through simulation.

Comprehensive review of data exchange in vehicle-to-pedestrian communications: State of the art

Pedestrian safety is a serious problem in transportation systems because pedestrian and vehicle crashes often result in fatalities amongst vulnerable road users. A vehicle-to-pedestrian (V2P) communication system allows data exchange between pedestrians and vehicles to prevent or minimise potential dangers of accidents from happening. This work aimed to analyse and review the previous work associated with information exchange in the V2P communication system and classify the existing technology utilized for this purpose. Motivation, accessible problems confronting researchers, and suggestions posed to researchers to develop this critical area of study have been among the reasons considered to enhance awareness of the field's numerous qualitative facets in reported investigations and properties. All of the papers have been divided into four categories: growth, analysis, and survey, FRAMEWORK, and data exchange in the V2P communication system. V2P communication is an area that necessitates automated solutions, instruments, and techniques that allow pedestrian detection and prediction. Pedestrian identification and data sharing on V2P have been the subject of several experiments in order to support pedestrian protection techniques. The reasons, open barriers that hinder the technology's usefulness, and authors' suggestions have been used to identify the essential characteristics of this evolving sector. This study is intended to provide researchers with new resources and enable them to focus on the holes that have been found.

Collision Avoidance of Low Speed Autonomous Shuttles with Pedestrians

This paper is on a pedestrian collision avoidance system for low speed autonomous shuttles based on Vehicle-to-Pedestrian (V2P) communication. When pedestrians cannot be detected using line-of-sight sensors like camera, radar and LIDAR, V2P communication with the Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) enabled pedestrian smartphone is used to detect and localize them through the in-vehicle DSRC radio used for Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication. The vehicle, then, either stops or, if possible, goes around the pedestrian in a socially acceptable manner using the elastic band method for locally modifying the vehicle trajectory in real time. The elastic band method of collision avoidance is modified for fast real time execution in this paper. Along with model-in-the-loop simulations, a hardware-in-the-loop simulator using an automated driving vehicle model in the high fidelity vehicle dynamics simulation program Carsim Real Time with Sensors and Traffic with two DSRC modems emulating the vehicle and pedestrian communications is introduced and used in this paper as a prerequisite to real world experiments. Both stationary and moving pedestrians are considered in the model and hardware-in-the-loop simulations. Two real world experiments are also presented to demonstrate the V2P based avoidance of crashes between low speed autonomous shuttles and pedestrians.

Wi-Fi Direct Performance Evaluation for V2P Communications

The high cost of IEEE 802.11p-compliant devices and the lack of a widely adopted standard motivate the search for alternative methods for vehicular communication. As a consequence, and due to the ubiquity of smartphones, we see an increasing number of proposals based on Wi-Fi Direct, especially related to the integration of pedestrians in VANETs. Nevertheless, given the complexity of real experimentation, it is difficult to assess the ability of Wi-Fi Direct to offer connectivity in the vehicular environment on a large scale, leading to the evaluation through simulation. In order to verify the ability of a simulation model of reproducing the Wi-Fi Direct behavior, we analyze the performance of a safety application based on the communication range, packet delivery rate, and packet inter-reception time. In V2P scenarios, with and without line of sight, with varying vehicle speed, measurements using smartphones are performed and their results compared with those of OMNeT++ simulator. The results indicate, apart from the simulator’s accuracy, that the connection establishment time hinders the use of Wi-Fi Direct as a replacement to 802.11p. As an outcome of this observation, we evaluate a new transmission method for Wi-Fi Direct based on beacon stuffing, which mitigates the long connection establishment issue.

Large-Scale Fading Characteristics and Models for Vehicle-to-Pedestrian Channel at 5-GHz

Vehicle-to-Pedestrian (V2P) communication is essential to enable a reliable collision avoidance system for vehicles and vulnerable road users (VRUs). In order to develop a reliable communication system accurate channel models are required. However, no dedicated channel model for V2P communication in critical scenarios has been proposed so far. To develop a channel model, we conducted wideband channel sounding measurements considering a typical collision scenario between a vehicle and a pedestrian in line-of-sight (LoS) and non-LoS (NLoS) situations. The wideband measurement data is used to study the characteristics of large-scale or shadow fading, pathloss and diffraction loss. The spatial correlation of shadow fading is examined and different models are proposed. For NLoS scenario, a 3D scenario model is designed to simulate the diffraction at a row of parked vehicles. The diffraction loss due to parked vehicles is analyzed and modeled based on multiple knife-edge diffraction model combined with a two-ray pathloss model. The results show that the proposed diffraction model provides a good match to the measured pathloss.

Vehicle-to-Pedestrian Communication Modeling and Collision Avoiding Method in Connected Vehicle Environment

A generalized framework consisting of a stochastic model, a responsive control method, and typical scenarios using vehicle-to-pedestrian (V2P) communication is proposed to improve pedestrian safety. The proposed stochastic model formulates various effects of uncertainties in a V2P communication system. The responsive control method is used to improve pedestrian safety under V2P communication conditions. Results show that adopting only Bluetooth or Wi-Fi (wireless local area network) technology, which has a high establishment time, is not sufficient for V2P communication, whereas dedicated short-range communication (DSRC) featuring low latencies meets requirements. A case study in the field was conducted to evaluate the feasibility of responsive control; it was concluded that with the use of the proposed model and the responsive control method, Bluetooth technology combined with DSRC could be workable for active pedestrian protection.

Fusion of Perception and V2P Communication Systems for the Safety of Vulnerable Road Users

With cooperative intelligent transportation systems, vulnerable road users (VRU) safety can be enhanced by multiple means. On the one hand, perception systems are based on embedded sensors to protect VRUs. However, such systems may fail due to the sensors’ visibility conditions and imprecision. On the other hand, vehicle-to-pedestrian (V2P) communication can contribute to the VRU safety by allowing vehicles and pedestrians to exchange information. This solution is, however, largely affected by the reliability of the exchanged information, which most generally is the GPS data. Since perception and communication have complementary features, we can expect that a fusion between these two approaches can be a solution to the VRU safety. In this paper, we propose a cooperative system that combines the outputs of communication and perception. After introducing theoretical models of both individual approaches, we develop a probabilistic association between perception and V2P communication information by means of multi-hypothesis tracking. Experimental studies are conducted to demonstrate the applicability of this approach in real-world environments. Our results show that the cooperative VRU protection system can benefit of the redundancy coming from the perception and communication technologies both in line-of-sight (LOS) and non-LOS conditions. We establish that the performances of this system are influenced by the classification performances of the perception system and by the accuracy of the GPS positioning transmitted by the communication system.

An Energy Efficient Vehicle to Pedestrian Communication Method for Safety Applications

In vehicular safety applications, vehicles exchange safety messages, which include vehicle's speed, location, and so on. Based on these messages, the safety applications can take appropriate action. In order to increase reliability of the safety message, WAVE standard is being researched. The WAVE standard defines various procedure to support reliable safety message transmission. However, although the standard can support V2V accident avoidance, it overlooks a vehicle-to-pedestrian (V2P) accident since we do not have any support to exchange the safety messages between the pedestrians and vehicles. Nowadays, the pedestrians will be able to exchange the safety messages with vehicles through the mobile devices such as smartphone to avoid the V2P accidents. However, unlike vehicles, the mobile devices are energy-constrained since they work with limited batteries. Moreover, the reliability of the V2V safety applications can be decreased due to collision between safety messages transmitted from the mobile devices. In order to provide energy efficient V2P communication and reduce the collision between safety messages, a group based mobile device management method is required. In this paper, we therefore introduce our V2P accident avoidance scenario and propose energy efficient methods to enable the V2P communication based on Wi-Fi Direct technique which is a promising group-based wireless device management technique.

Relay by Smart Device: Innovative Communications for Efficient Information Sharing Among Vehicles and Pedestrians

The combination of vehicles and mobile computers, such as smartphones and wearable devices, has provided many applications in our daily life. However, it is still limited to the applications in personal use. In fact, by utilizing the device-to-device technologies, which make use of the mobile device resources, vehicle-to-pedestrian (V2P), vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V), and pedestrian-to-pedestrian (P2P) communications can be more effective and convenient. In this article, we present a concept of relay by smart device that aims at information dissemination by smart communication devices, which can contribute to efficient information sharing among vehicles and pedestrians. We propose a novel technique for effectively forming and disbanding the groups of vehicles and pedestrians for their communications. The proposed mechanism is based on three criteria, namely, the stability of the group, the activity of the group, and the qualification as a group leader. Procedures for group forming and disbanding are introduced. We develop a prototype as a smartphone application using Wi-Fi technology, referred to as the second generation of relay by smartphone, which is the smartphone type of relay by smart device. The results of the field experiment show that the proposed group-based information sharing technology has a good potential to be utilized in V2P, V2V, and P2P communications.