Coordinated Braking Strategies Supporting Mixed Autonomous and Conventional Vehicles

Autonomous driving vehicles are becoming popular as a solution to reach safe, efficient and comfortable mobility. However, at early market penetration, autonomous vehicles based on Cooperative ACC (C-ACC) policies will have to co-exist in mixed traffic conditions with less autonomous vehicles, such as Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) or conventional vehicles. In this paper, we introduce a simple concept by which vehicles with such advanced technology would help avoid not only possible collisions onto other vehicles in front (front end collisions) but also collisions of conventionally driven following vehicles onto itself (rear end collision), and this under non ideal circumstances, where vehicle gets informed about an obstacle later than usual due to communication or sensing limitations. We show a superior performance of our approach against a baseline ACC strategy, and our results encourage the possibility of keeping low inter vehicular spacing between conventional and autonomous vehicles without fearing collisions.