The advent of Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) has led to renewed consideration of cooperative active safety where vehicles "talk" to other vehicles and the infrastructure, and the infrastructure in turn communicates with vehicles. This carries with it the possibility of markedly improving the important driver acceptance aspect. This paper investigates thecenter of the active safety system, the driver, and specifically the increase (or decrease) in the effectiveness of the active safety countermeasure based on his/her confidence and concomitant reliance on the system. The primary example will be with active safety forward collision warning systems, operating in an autonomous mode and also in the cooperative active safety mode. The difference between the two is that in the cooperative activesafety mode, the vehicle in front can send via DSRC from its in-vehicle data bus, data from its accelerometers, yaw rate sensors, brake pressure sensors and possibly other on-board state information sensors. This can result in timely and reliable information from the vehicle in front and can provide a reliable forward collision warning system. A secondary example of cooperative active safety systems in curve overspeed will be discussed butnot to any great extent; this example will be given to extend the thinking. Depending on the degrees of driver acceptance assumed, set at four discrete levels varying from "cautious skepticism" through "complacent acceptance", cooperative active safety will be a clear winner, as reliability instills confidence. From this analysis, therefore, a framework is presented and populated with preliminary values. With refined experimental data as cooperative active safety research and operational tests are conducted, thedegree of effectiveness, or alternately, system reliability in preventingvehicle crashes can be determined. For the covering abstract see ITRD E134653.
Abstract