Collaborative navigation systems for collision avoidance

Accidents on roads are one of the main causes of human loss and damages to property every day and anywhere that vehicles travel. Communications-based approaches to reducing highway accidents include vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications. However, while V2V and V2I are promising approaches for reducing accidents, they require installation of new sensors in vehicles and the information they can produce is limited. In this paper, we present the navigation-to-navigation (Nav2Nav) approach for reducing accidents on roads which is different from V2V and V2I from several perspectives including: (a) the widespread availability and use of navigation systems with no installation requirement, (b) the familiarity and acceptance of navigation systems by many people around the word, (c) the availability of map databases in navigation systems which facilitates map matching (the process of finding the correct segment of road as opposed to raw positioning data) and prediction in navigation, and (d) the availability of routes requested by drivers. © 2010 ICST