Cooperative Cars

Welcome to the first post of the Cooperative Cars blog. This blog will try to keep up with what is going on in the field of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and specifically in the sub-field of cooperating and communicating vehicles.

Communicating vehicles is a new and active research field that applies concepts from wireless communication, ad-hoc networking and traffic research in order to create safer, cleaner and more efficient transportation.

This all sounds great but what does it really mean?

Imagine driving home from work during rush-hour at night, heavy rain, poor visibility. Suddenly you hear a warning chime and the accelerator pedal pushes up, forcing you to decelerate. Half a minute later you see the glare of flashing warning lights as you approach the scene of a recent traffic accident.

Luckily the vehicles involved in the crash were equipped with new technology that allowed them to transmit warning beacons wirelessly to other vehicles in the vicinity. These messages were then forwarded via multihop communication to other vehicles upstream which in turn forwarded them one hop further, and so on.

This scenario is only one of many that illustrates how information exchange between vehicles can increase the safety on our roads. In order to enable this chain of events we will need research into a number of interesting areas. How do we for example make sure the warning messages get from one point in the network to another when vehicles move at relative velocities of more than 60m/s? How should warning messages be presented to drivers? How many vehicles must be equipped with the system for it to be useful?

Welcome to the world of Cooperative Cars!