Collective Localization of Communicant Vehicles Applied to Collision Avoidance

This paper considers the problem of cooperative localization of a heterogeneous group of road vehicles. Each vehicle can be equipped with proprioceptive and exteroceptive sensors enabling it to localize itself in its environment and also to localize (but not to identify) the other members of the group. Localization information can be exchanged between the vehicles through a wireless communication device. Every member of the group maintains (if possible) an estimation of the state of its environment and transmits it (if possible) to its neighbors. The global state of the environment is obtained by fusing the environment states of the vehicles. The fused state contains position, orientation and speed information of the other vehicles, this information is used to compute the collision probability in order to warn the driver if the risk becomes high