Intersection Turn Control Using Time-to-Arrival Collision Checks
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Solution Overview
Problem
Accidents at intersections often occur due to driver misjudgment of approaching vehicle speed and trajectory, leading to potential collisions during maneuvers like turning or merging.
Innovation Solution
A vehicle collision avoidance system utilizing vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications, combined with GPS data and image processing, to determine the safety of driving maneuvers by calculating the time to arrival of approaching vehicles and generating alerts or initiating automatic braking if a collision is likely.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If driver manually judges approaching vehicle speed and trajectory, then driver maintains full control of vehicle, but collision risk increases due to human misjudgment
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces V2V communication modules and sensor systems as intermediaries between vehicles to automatically exchange and process positional, speed, and trajectory data. This mediator system calculates time-to-collision and generates warnings without requiring direct human judgment of approaching vehicles, thereby improving collision avoidance reliability while maintaining driver control through informational support rather than direct intervention.
2Reliability
If system generates collision warnings, then collision avoidance capability improves, but driver workload and alert fatigue may increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies local quality by providing targeted, context-specific warnings only when actual collision risk is detected through V2V data analysis, rather than continuous alerts. The system selectively activates warnings based on calculated time-to-collision thresholds and relative position data, ensuring alerts are generated only when genuinely necessary, thus maintaining high warning accuracy while preventing driver fatigue from excessive notifications.
3Measurement precision
If system uses V2V and V2I communications with multiple sensors, then collision detection accuracy improves, but energy consumption and system complexity increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements periodic action by updating V2V communication and sensor data processing at optimized intervals rather than continuously. The system periodically requests position and speed data from nearby vehicles and infrastructure, processes this information to recalculate collision risk, and updates warnings accordingly. This periodic operation maintains measurement precision for collision detection while significantly reducing energy consumption compared to continuous monitoring and processing.
Data Source
AI summary
A vehicular control system includes a camera, a radar sensor and a processor operable to process image data captured by the camera and radar data captured by the radar sensor. Responsive at least in part to determination that the equipped vehicle will not complete a turn at an intersection before an estimated time to arrival of a detected approaching vehicle at the intersection elapses, the system determines that it is not safe to proceed along the projected path of travel. The system determines that it is safe for the equipped vehicle to proceed along the projected path of travel responsive at least in part to (i) determination that the equipped vehicle will complete the turn at the intersection before the estimated time to arrival of the approaching vehicle at the intersection elapses and (ii) determination that no object is present in the projected path of travel of the equipped vehicle.