Review of the Book Predicting Vehicle Trajectory [Book Review]

The book concentrates on the improvement of the prediction of a future vehicle trajectory, giving emphasis on the cases of non-straight paths. The trajectory is the path that a moving object (in our case a vehicle) follows through space as a function of time. In several cases in our physical world, trajectories can be described mathematically either by the geometry of the path or as the position of the object over time. However, in intelligent transportation systems this is not applicable and therefore having a reliable prediction of a vehicle position in the very near future is crucial to determine possible path intersections, collisions of vehicles or diversion from the road. As stated in the book “The US Department of Transportation will be mandating that all vehicle manufacturers begin implementing Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) systems, so very soon collision avoidance systems will no longer rely on line of sight sensors, but instead will be able to take into account another vehicle’s spatial movements to determine if the future trajectories of the vehicles will intersect at the same time”. To this end, this book offers the reader some improvements for predicting the future trajectory of a vehicle and presents a novel temporary solution on how to speed up the implementation of such V2V collision avoidance systems. Additionally, the book evaluates whether smartphones can be used for trajectory predictions, to populate a V2V collision avoidance system faster than a vehicle manufacturer can.