Sensing the environment for future driver assistance combining autonomous and cooperative appliances

Current driver assistance systems such as Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) and in particular future assistance systems (e.g. Collision Warning) make high demands on reliability of detection and ranging methods for vehicles within their vicinity. Autonomous systems such as Radar which are already integrated into a multitude of vehicles meet these requirements to only a limited extent. As an alternative, cooperative systems for detection and ranging will be enabled by future Vehicle-2-Vehicle communication. But even if the technology is deployed in every vehicle, cooperative detection and ranging also has drawbacks regarding reliability due to positioning and transmission errors if it is applied in a standalone way. Thus, the solution presented in this paper is a hybrid approach combining autonomous and cooperative methods for detection and ranging within a common architecture. A particle filter is used for state estimation. The results are a higher detection effectiveness and a lower position error compared to using standalone autonomous or cooperative detection and ranging methods