Situation refinement for in-vehicle platforms in vehicular networks

The advanced situation awareness of the driver in the road environment is very important for vehicular safety applications, especially for mitigating the harmful effects of collisions. Nowadays, advanced driver assistance systems are based on on-board sensors. The evolution of wireless networks lead to the exploitation of cooperation among vehicles to enhance road safety. In this paper the benefits from using wireless communications for enhancing the situation awareness of the driver are highlighted. The situation around the vehicle is analyzed based on information coming from both on-board sensors and wireless LAN messages. Every equipped vehicle broadcasts twice per second a message including information about its global position (WGS84), velocity, acceleration, heading, yaw rate and other useful parameters. This information in combination with advanced digital maps is very useful for enhancing safety in road environments. The work described here is part of the work carried out for the European integrated research project SAFESPOT.