Enhancing Driver Assistance Systems by Cooperative Situation Awareness

Driver Assistance Systems support drivers in their task of driving a vehicle. There are various applications which work on different levels of assistance and perform different types of assistance. All these applications need some information of their current situation. Adaptive Cruise Control for instance senses the velocity of the preceding vehicle and adapts the own velocity accordingly. Currently one application senses merely its required information and performs an assessment of the situation merely on the basis of this information. By bringing Situation Awareness to the Driver Assistance System all applications have access to a suitable situation description and may assess a situation more precisely and reliably at an early stage. Cooperation of distributed Situation-Aware Driver Assistance Systems allows the exchange of information on the current situation and thus enhances the quality of the situation description. The objective of this paper is to present the concept of Cooperative Situation Awareness for Driver Assistance Systems that enables the deployment of more sophisticated and novel applications. These future applications will increase safety and efficiency on road.