A New Collision Judgment Algorithm for Pedestrian-Vehicular Collision Avoidance Support System (P-VCASS) in Advanced ITS

In recent years, researchers have studied extensively about vehicle collision avoidance. The authors have developed Vehicular Collision Avoidance Support System (VCASS) based on Inter-Vehicle Communications (IVC) in order to prevent a vehicular collision beforehand. The system grasps the relative locations of vehicles by exchanging the GPS information in each vehicle. Then the system warns drivers if it detects a danger of collision. VCASS can drastically reduce the potential accidents of vehicular collisions. However, VCASS can not avoid collisions between vehicles and pedestrians, but avoid collisions just between vehicles. About 34% of fatal accidents by vehicles happen with pedestrians in Japan. So it is necessary to develop a new system for pedestrians. This paper deals with collision avoidance between pedestrians and vehicles. There are problems to develop such system. It is necessary to consider the mobility characteristics of pedestrians. In this paper, we propose a new collision judgment algorithm for Pedestrian-Vehicular Collision Avoidance Support System (P-VCASS) which extends VCASS. This algorithm considers the mobility of pedestrians. We show the validity of the proposed system by experiments using vehicles and pedestrian terminals.