A New Paradigm for Intelligent Collision Avoidance via Interactive and Interdependent Generic Maneuvers

This paper introduces a new paradigm for avoiding vehicle collisions in intelligent transportation systems. The key feature of the concept is that we introduce interactive control of different vehicular sub-systems ultimately leading to interdependent maneuvering of vehicles in order to avoid collision encounters. A general scenario of motion of vehicular systems passing a common point at the same time is studied here. Using a fuzzy logic-based controller, collision avoidance maneuvers of the individual vehicular sub-systems are realized. An inter-vehicle communication (IVC) system that facilitates interactions between the vehicles is studied as a top tier above the individual vehicular controllers. The concept that is adopted here is that in order to control a general system with participatory sub-systems of vehicles, all the influencing members have to interactively work together in order to effectively negotiate to achieve an optimal result in avoiding collision encounters. While the interactive operations are being carried out, each vehicular sub-system may act as a ´master´ one time and a ´slave´ at another time. This switching between the states of ´master´ and ´slave´ should be done efficiently to better prevent a collision encounter. Even though above paradigm is proved only for two interactive sub-systems, it is emphasized that the concept can be extended to any number of vehicular sub-systems to realize effective collision avoidance maneuvers.