A Cooperative Overtaking Assistance System

One of the most risky maneuvers in roads with both directions in the same carriageway and only one lane for each direction is overtaking another vehicle. To overtake becomes particularly dangerous at night, with bad weather conditions and in curves, due to the diminution of the visibility. This paper presents a system to assist the driver in scenarios of bad visibility for overtaking. The system works as follows: when a lane change of the ego-vehicle is predicted by means of a filter which employs information of the vehicle kinematics and the road shape, the communication subsystem reports this event along with the navigation data of the ego-vehicle via the cellular network. Those vehicles in an area of interest which approach the same location and drive in opposite direction are subject to study by the scene interpreter subsystem. The trajectories of both vehicles are predicted according to their kinematics and the information of the road shape stored on a digital map, and an indicator of the estimated risk of the maneuver is provided based on it. The system under consideration has been found to be useful for the problem under consideration in experiments performed in real environments.